mobilization. The Battle of Britain would make the fighter pilot the most glamorous figure in the RAF, but in the years between the wars the bomber crews considered themselves the elite of the service.
The most celebrated writers of the day launched forth upon the horrors of air attack with the passion a later generation would bring to those of the atomic bomb. Beverley Nichols and A. A. Milne denounced its barbarity. The Times declared in 1933 that ‘it would be the bankruptcy of statesmanship to admit that it is a legitimate form of warfare for a nation to destroy its rival capital from the air’. Bernard Shaw reflected gloomily on ‘cities where millions of inhabitants are dependent for light and heat, water and food, on centralized mechanical organs like great steel hearts and arteries that can be smashed in half an hour by a boy in a bomber’. 4 The Royal Navy, which still clung to the conviction that war could be waged with chivalry, was foremost in the assault on the RAF and its weapons. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty wrote a letter to The Times . Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond delivered a lecture to the Royal United Services Institution in which he declared disdainfully that ‘frightfulness, expressly repudiated in the case of sea warfare, appears to be a fundamental principle in the air’.
There was also, however, a highly articulate air lobby, championing the cause of the new force. The airmen themselves argued – as they would reiterate repeatedly for the next half century – that in the age of industrialized mass slaughter it was ridiculous to draw an artificial line at some point between a tank factory and the front line, where the tank and those responsible for it became morally acceptable targets. A body called ‘The Hands Off Britain Air Defence League’ was distributing pamphlets in 1933: ‘Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at four o’clock and wipe out London at eight? Create a new winged army of long range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests!’
Air Power has its dreams [wrote one of the RAF’s foremost public advocates, a civil servant at the Air Ministry, Mr J. M. Spaight]. It knows that its qualities are unique. The armoury of the invincible knight of old held no such weapon as that which it wields. It dreams of using its powers to the full. It dreams of victory achieved perhaps by a swift, sudden, overwhelming stroke at the heart and nerve centre of a foe, perhaps by a gathering wave of assaults that will submerge the morale and the will to war of the enemy people, perhaps by ventures as yet but dimly apprehended. Its mystery is half its power . . . 5
In one passage of his book Air Power and Cities , the lyrical Mr Spaight recommended an interesting moral compromise to validate air bombardment of cities: ‘The destruction of property not strictly classifiable as military should be legitimized under strict conditions designed to prevent loss of life, eg by confining bombardments of establishments tenanted only by day (as many large factories are) to the hours of darkness . . .’
In the last decade before the Second World War, it is no exaggeration to say that the threat of aerial bombardment and the difficulties of defence against it became a public obsession in Britain and France – in Germany propaganda was already too dominant for any similar neurosis to develop. Americans could view the development of air power with detachment, conscious that no likely enemy bomber force possessed the range to reachtheir shores. For the rest of the civilized world, a horrifying vision was conjured up by the apostles of air power. Baldwin, Britain’s former Prime Minister and a prominent member of the Coalition Cabinet, confirmed the worst fears of many people when he addressed the House of Commons on 10 November 1932, winding up a debate on international affairs:
I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect
The most celebrated writers of the day launched forth upon the horrors of air attack with the passion a later generation would bring to those of the atomic bomb. Beverley Nichols and A. A. Milne denounced its barbarity. The Times declared in 1933 that ‘it would be the bankruptcy of statesmanship to admit that it is a legitimate form of warfare for a nation to destroy its rival capital from the air’. Bernard Shaw reflected gloomily on ‘cities where millions of inhabitants are dependent for light and heat, water and food, on centralized mechanical organs like great steel hearts and arteries that can be smashed in half an hour by a boy in a bomber’. 4 The Royal Navy, which still clung to the conviction that war could be waged with chivalry, was foremost in the assault on the RAF and its weapons. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty wrote a letter to The Times . Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond delivered a lecture to the Royal United Services Institution in which he declared disdainfully that ‘frightfulness, expressly repudiated in the case of sea warfare, appears to be a fundamental principle in the air’.
There was also, however, a highly articulate air lobby, championing the cause of the new force. The airmen themselves argued – as they would reiterate repeatedly for the next half century – that in the age of industrialized mass slaughter it was ridiculous to draw an artificial line at some point between a tank factory and the front line, where the tank and those responsible for it became morally acceptable targets. A body called ‘The Hands Off Britain Air Defence League’ was distributing pamphlets in 1933: ‘Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at four o’clock and wipe out London at eight? Create a new winged army of long range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests!’
Air Power has its dreams [wrote one of the RAF’s foremost public advocates, a civil servant at the Air Ministry, Mr J. M. Spaight]. It knows that its qualities are unique. The armoury of the invincible knight of old held no such weapon as that which it wields. It dreams of using its powers to the full. It dreams of victory achieved perhaps by a swift, sudden, overwhelming stroke at the heart and nerve centre of a foe, perhaps by a gathering wave of assaults that will submerge the morale and the will to war of the enemy people, perhaps by ventures as yet but dimly apprehended. Its mystery is half its power . . . 5
In one passage of his book Air Power and Cities , the lyrical Mr Spaight recommended an interesting moral compromise to validate air bombardment of cities: ‘The destruction of property not strictly classifiable as military should be legitimized under strict conditions designed to prevent loss of life, eg by confining bombardments of establishments tenanted only by day (as many large factories are) to the hours of darkness . . .’
In the last decade before the Second World War, it is no exaggeration to say that the threat of aerial bombardment and the difficulties of defence against it became a public obsession in Britain and France – in Germany propaganda was already too dominant for any similar neurosis to develop. Americans could view the development of air power with detachment, conscious that no likely enemy bomber force possessed the range to reachtheir shores. For the rest of the civilized world, a horrifying vision was conjured up by the apostles of air power. Baldwin, Britain’s former Prime Minister and a prominent member of the Coalition Cabinet, confirmed the worst fears of many people when he addressed the House of Commons on 10 November 1932, winding up a debate on international affairs:
I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect
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