first action of the strategic air campaign. The targets included factories in Dortmund, Sterkrade, Castrop-Rauxel and Cologne. One bomb, aimed at the IG-Werk at Dormagen, landed on a farm and killed Franz Romeike, a dairyman. Local rumour had it that he had switched on a light on his way to the lavatory and attracted the attention of a bomb-aimer. The story revealed an exaggerated notion of the accuracy of bombing, but an entirely realistic understanding of how randomly death could arrive in an air raid.
By attacking industry and communications, Bomber Command was fulfilling its raison d’être but the events of the rest of the summer meant it was deflected from concentrating on this activity. In July, having swallowed France, Germany turned its attention to Britain, launching the Luftwaffe across the Channel in an attempt to clear the skies for a possible invasion. Bomber Command was ordered to weaken the enemy’s air strength at its source by destroying aluminium plants, airframe factories and stores. It was also tasked with attacking airfields and sinking the barges appearing in the North Sea waterways to carry the invasion troops. On top of all this, it was expected to continue hitting oil, communications and industrial targets when it could.
The weight of Bomber Command’s duties meant there was no concentration of effort and the effects of their bombing, apart from on troop transports, were negligible. Nonetheless, throughout the summer the Air Ministry showered its commander-in-chief, Sir Charles Portal, with directives. Portal was a realist and a sceptic, whose perfect manners and quiet demeanour hid a mind that was as cool and hard as marble. It was he, as much as anyone, who led Bomber Command away from its pursuit of a precision that was, initially at least, unattainable, and towards a policy of annihilation. Portal queried, in his courteous but firm fashion, the wisdom of attacking the German aircraft industry. Many of the targets were sited in remote areas. He pointed out that ‘the very high percentage of bombs which inevitably miss the actual target will hit nothing else of importance and do no damage and the minimum amount of dislocation and disturbance will be caused by the operations as a whole.’ He also advocated that when initial targets could not be reached because of bad weather, aircraft should be free to dump bombs on alternatives, thus increasing ‘the moral effect of our operations by the alarm and disturbance created over the wider area’.
With these observations, which caused some surprise and concern at the ministry, Portal opened the way to a crucial shift in bombing policy. In his view, any damage was better than none and undermining morale, the moral effect in the language of the day, was a very important and desirable product of aerial bombardment. The Air Staff felt the need to sound a cautionary note. It felt that ‘moral effect, although an extremely important subsidiary result of air bombardment, cannot in itself be decisive’.8 For the time being, at least, it maintained its faith in what it believed were selective, precise attacks.
Portal was being indiscreet in advocating so frankly the spreading of panic. But he was stating a belief that had been accepted inside the air force from the earliest days. Despite undertaking that the RAF would not attack the civilian population as such, it was understood that any attack on land-based strategic targets would result in civilians dying. Trenchard’s independent force had killed 746 innocent Germans in the 242 raids it mounted in the six months of its existence.
Few moral contortions were necessary to justify certain civilian deaths. Many took the view that the factory worker manufacturing shells was as lawful a target as the artilleryman firing them. The killing of women and children naturally caused revulsion. But at the same time it was widely accepted that all bloodshed, or the threat of it, had beneficial results in lowering enemy spirits and undermining the will to sustain the war effort. This was no more than a reflection of Trenchard’s dictum that the moral effect of bombing was twenty times that of the material effect. The question was, as the Air Ministry reply made clear, whether the issue of morale could be decisive. And if it could, should morale itself be a primary target of strategic bombing?
The first reports filtering out of Germany suggested that this might be the case. Germans had been led to believe that they would be largely untroubled by air attack, and very well protected if any should occur. The thin evidence available, from neutral journalists and diplomats and a handful of spies, spoke of shock and dismay among ordinary citizens that the war had entered their towns.
Meagre though this testimony was, it reinforced the conviction in some quarters that German nerves were weaker than those of the British. This was Trenchard’s belief. It was not Churchill’s, who in October 1917, when calls for revenge for the German air raids were at their loudest, had dismissed the idea that a response in kind could produce a German surrender. ‘Nothing that we have learned of the capacity of the German population to endure suffering justifies us in assuming that they could be cowed into submission by such methods,’ he wrote.9
Even if the Germans’ pluck was suspect, it was questionable whether this would produce any immediate advantage for Britain and its allies. An influential subcommittee reporting to the Chiefs of Staff had pointed out with some understatement three years before the outbreak of war that ‘a military dictatorship is likely to be less susceptible to popular outcry than a democratic government’.10 This was only common sense, but it was to be very often forgotten or ignored.
The Battle of Britain and the Blitz provided the great test of British morale. In the first two months of the air war, 1,333 people were killed as German bombs missed their targets or were scattered at random when the raiders headed for home. On the night of 24 August the first bombs fell on central London and a fortnight later it experienced its first heavy bombardment. That month 6,954 civilians were killed all over Britain, and a further 6,334 in October. This was death on a hideously larger scale than had been endured in the previous war.
In the capital, the bombs were ostensibly aimed at docks, railways and other locations with an arguable military or war-industrial value. In practice they landed everywhere. They fell on Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, Kensington Palace, Lambeth Palace and Buckingham Palace, twice. They hit hospitals and theatres, the London Zoo and Madame Tussaud’s. They crashed down on rich and poor alike, the brick terraces of the East End and the stucco squares of Kensington and Mayfair. But the great sprawl of London meant that the violence lacked concentration. As one part of the city was ‘getting it bad’ another was having a relatively quiet night. The capital adjusted quickly to death from the air. The damage was spectacular but had minimal effect on the war effort. There was little sign of the collapse of morale feared by the authorities, even though the Blitz was to continue, night after night, until the following spring.
Churchill had reacted to the first London raid by ordering an attack on Berlin. It went ahead on the night of 25 August. The city was covered with thick cloud making aiming virtually impossible. The incendiary bombs that did fall within the city limits did little damage, mostly landing harmlessly in open country. There were three further raids on Berlin in the next few days. The prime minister wanted to spread the attacks throughout Germany but faced resistance from the Air Staff who continued to argue for narrow and selective targeting.
But as the German bombardment persisted, such a detached view became untenable. As a concession to the new mood, on 21 September the Air Staff directed Portal to continue the assault on Berlin. The bombers should aim for ‘legitimate’ targets such as railways and the like. But the object was also to cause ‘the greatest possible disturbance and dislocation both to the industrial activities and to the civil population generally in the area.’11
To Portal, the directive did not go nearly far enough. Ten days before he had offered a new policy to the staff, based on direct retaliation. He suggested twenty German towns should be warned by radio broadcast that each attack on a British town would be repaid by a heavy, indiscriminate attack by Bomber Command on one of their number. Alternatively, a town like Essen, the home of the arms manufacturer Krupp, which could be regarded in its entirety as a military target, could be subjected to overwhelming bombardment. Another approach was to select a military target, presumably a barracks or suchlike, for an all-out assault in ‘the knowledge that the
