Bomber Command by Max Hastings Page A

Portal, Harris, Cochrane and Slessor were among the most prominent. The Hon. Ralph Cochrane, for example, who would be Harris’s outstanding wartime Group commander, met Trenchard in Egypt one day in 1921. Cochrane had joined the Royal Navy in 1908 and flew airships on convoy escort during the First World War. He once tried to hit a German submarine with four 8-lb bombs without successfully convincing either himself or the enemy of the efficacy of air power. He was still an airship man when ‘Boom’ entered his life. ‘Young man,’ said the fatherly Trenchard, ‘you’re wasting your time. Go and learn to fly an aeroplane.’ Within a few years of this Damascene conversion Cochrane was a flight commander in Iraq, where Harris was converting Vernon troop carriers into bombers on his own initiative, and experimenting with the prone position for bomb-aiming.
    In the years between the wars, air power and the threat of bombing offensives against great cities became matters of growing publicdebate and concern. They provoked an enormous literature, much of it fanciful, on bombers and air defence, on air-raid precautions and the morality of bombing. It is generally accepted that the godfather of air power was the Italian General Giulio Douhet, whose book The Command of the Air was published in 1921. Douhet ranks alongside Trenchard and Billy Mitchell in America, the most important advocates of assault on the heart of a nation by self-contained, self-defending bomber formations. Captain Basil Liddell Hart and Colonel J. F. C. Fuller would come to be regarded as the foremost British military thinkers of the twentieth century, and in later life became formidable opponents of Bomber Command’s strategic air offensive. But in 1920 Fuller foresaw that in the next war ‘Fleets of aeroplanes will attack the enemy’s great industrial and governing centres. All these attacks will be made against the civil population in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker . . .’ 2 Liddell Hart wrote in 1925, in his book Paris, or the Future of War :
A modern state is such a complex and interdependent fabric that it offers a target highly sensitive to a sudden and overwhelming blow from the air . . . Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham and half a dozen other great centres simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed. Would not the general will to resist vanish, and what use would be the still determined fractions of the nation, without organization and central direction? 3
     
    Here, from a soldier, was a prophecy that Trenchard himself might have hesitated to match. The concept of limitless terror from the air grew throughout the 1920s. In 1925 the Air Staff were asked by the Government to project the casualties in the event of an attack on Britain by the air force of France, with whom British relations were then strained almost to breaking point. They answered: 1,700 killed and 3,300 wounded in the first twenty-fourhours; 1,275 killed and 2,475 wounded in the second twenty-four hours; 850 killed and 1,650 wounded in every twenty-four hours thereafter. This was merely a crude projection of casualties suffered during the German surprise attack of 1917. The War Office was highly critical of the Air Staff’s figures, but the public – to whom such forecasts eventually filtered through – was appalled. There were further anxious questions from politicians. Trenchard and his colleagues declared insistently that the only effective precaution against bomber attack was the possession of a British bomber force capable of inflicting comparable damage on an enemy. Fighter defence was useless. As late as 1934 the RAF’s fighter squadrons were still outnumbered two to one by bomber units, and depended heavily on reservists and auxiliaries to provide aircrew on