the French flat for daring to stick their nose into German territory, and a certain someone would throw in this sapper business and join the air force. Crawling around in the dirt was good enough for the likes of Süssmann and Bertin, men with no fighting instinct, no fire in their punches, old men, He, however, would metamorphose into a stone dragon with claws, a tail and fiery breath, which smoked little critters out of their hideaways – all the Niggls and other such creatures. He’d have a fragile box beneath him, two broad wings and a whirling propeller, and hey ho, up above the clouds he’d soar like a Sunday lark – admittedly not to sing songs but to drop bombs on the people crawling around below, to splatter them with gas and bullets as part of a duel from which only one person returns.25
Better than any other sources, literature makes visible the dichotomies that structured not only perception but also, to a large degree, strategic and doctrinal thinking. It also shows us another use of aviation of which the hagiographic sources only rarely speak, being in flagrant contradiction with the chivalrous image of the duel: bombing.26 There are exceptions, however, such as the ‘Red Baron’, Manfred von Richthofen, who describes the pleasure he felt in dropping bombs and machine-gunning humans on the ground.27 It is clear that Richthofen, at least, saw himself not as a knight but rather as a soldier practising his trade of killing without reservation.28
Given the rather unsuccessful results of the first bombs dropped before 1914, one may naturally wonder why the idea of aerial bombing was not dismissed right from the start. The answer is a double one, relating to two types of bombing, ‘tactical’ and ‘strategic’. Tactical bombing was first practised empirically, with bombs dropped more or less randomly. It soon appeared that planes could be used as an extension of artillery, to strike targets situated far behind the front, inaccessible to the largest of guns. Since military success on the front depended largely on rail communication and the ability to rapidly bring up men and materiel, the idea of attacking the logistic infrastructure behind the front – storage facilities, railway stations, encampments – was a logical conclusion. Nonetheless, the difficulties in striking precisely were underestimated. To take just one example, between 1 March and 20 June 1915, the Allies tried 141 times to bomb German railway stations, but only hit their target three times.29 Other attempts were abandoned on account of anti-aircraft fire, were blocked by enemy fighter planes; or failed due to technical problems, or indeed, more commonly, because the airmen simply missed their target. The bombs then landed in the countryside, leaving craters in the Flanders mud.
This tactical use of aviation, known as ‘interdiction’, was supplemented, particularly from 1917 on, by another use that was also tactical: ‘close support’, in other words simultaneous attacks by ground troops and aircraft.30 These operations were both hard to coordinate and dangerous, since the planes had to fly at low altitudes, and the targets, i.e., enemy troops, were in a position to respond. It was the German army that counted particularly on this tactic, which would become the basis of the blitzkrieg strategy after the First World War;31 the British air force, however, generally rejected subordination to the needs of land troops.
Alongside tactical bombing – whether interdiction or close support – there was strategic bombing, with a completely different history. The term ‘tactics’ referred traditionally to the art of winning a battle, while ‘strategy’ was the art of winning a war. Tactical bombing could thus mean the use of bombers in operations that also involved land or sea forces. Strategic bombing, on the other hand, was the doctrine that the air force would be sufficient in itself to vanquish the enemy. The tactical use of bombing was by and large invented, or improvised, during the First World War, before being largely forgotten in the inter-war years, even if its military effectiveness could not reasonably be doubted.32 Strategic bombing contrasted with tactical bombing all along the line: if it had long been anticipated, fantasized, feared, or hoped for, its military utility was objectively more than limited. Yet, despite this ineffectiveness, it was promised a radiant future. How can this paradox be explained?
First of all, in the early twentieth century, it was not absurd to consider that technology would undergo a major development that would supersede all past experience. This technological optimism was inseparably bound up with the imaginary power attached to aviation as the only weapon capable of breaking the battlefield paralysis. Then, the tactical situation at the front, particularly in the West, led soldiers to experiment with all kinds of new solutions. There was thus an element of military contingency. But an improvised solution could only be lastingly applied if it met the global political situation of the European nations at war: behind military contingency, then, there were in the end profound political causes.
As far as the military conjuncture was concerned, the stabilization of the front and the impossibility of breaking it led the belligerents to seek desperately for solutions to escape this paralysis. The first hope was to find such solutions on the front, by using ever heavier guns, tactical bombing, combat gas. It was the Central Powers, geostrategically under siege, who had the most to fear from the stalemate on the front, whereas the Entente, enjoying numerical superiority and command of the seas, could legitimately hope to sustain the war effort longer. It was not surprising, then, that it was the ‘contender’ that sought to win rapidly and by any means: from the invasion of Belgium, the German forces resorted to ever more violent means and were the first to use toxic gas against enemy forces. But after meeting with repeated failure to break the front in this way, Germany began to envisage other paths, to bypass the front and strike no longer the active armed forces but rather the sources of their power – industrial production, means of transport, and the political and moral cohesion of their peoples.
Aerial bombing falls into the heritage of naval bombing, practised in the Crimean War and in the colonies, then theorized by the ‘Jeune École’ as a way of checking British hegemony.33 After France’s alliance with the hegemonic powers before the First World War, the role of chief contender fell to Germany: it was thus logical that Germany should be the first to resort to the ‘terrorist’ methods that French republican strategists had already mapped out. Given the crushing British naval superiority in the North Sea, the German navy only left its home ports for lightning raids on British coastal towns at the end of 1914. One hundred and thirty-seven persons were killed, mostly civilians, and 592 injured.34 It was from precisely this logic that the military high command developed its plan to attack London from the air.35
Until the Great War, the debate between the respective champions of ‘lighter than air’ (balloons and airships) and ‘heavier than air’ (aeroplanes) was not yet settled. Some nations, including France, opted for the aeroplane, while others, like Germany, rather favoured the airship.36 Contrary to planes – small, unstable, and with limited range at the start of the war – Zeppelins were able to carry heavy loads of bombs and make the round trip between the front and London. The naval attacks of 1914 shocked international public opinion, and Wilhelm II initially prohibited this type of attack, authorizing it only after the bombing of German cities by French forces at the beginning of 1916.37 Air attacks were a periodic feature of the rest of the war, particularly in 1917, before it was decided to stop the experiment for lack of tangible military results. Who could seriously believe that the 227 civilians dead and 677 wounded in the raids on London of June and July 1917 could have any effect on the course of the war?38
All the same, the enemy nation owed it to itself to respond to such attacks. And this is where military contingency – improvisation and resort to terror provoking reprisals, and so on – is no longer a sufficient explanation, with deep political causes coming into play. Of the two contradictory developments that characterized the relation between nation and war in the twentieth century – the convergence between citizen and armed forces on the one hand, the immunity of civilian populations on the other – the first now gained the upper hand over the second.
It was not just that ‘nations’ were taken as targets; it was also these that mutually designated each other as targets. It was they that gave rise to strategic ideas and became the primordial actors of political life in the warring countries. To
