Bomber Command by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online Page A

collecting a Distinguished Flying Cross from Buckingham Palace a few weeks after the Wilhelmshaven raid. After a celebration with his crew, he took off from Weybridge to fly home to Norfolk, and almost immediately crashed into the ground.
    But if it had not been Weybridge, the odds were overwhelming that it would have been Cologne, Hanover, Berlin, or Frankfurt, some night in the five years that were to come. The Wilhelmshaven raid was merely a blooding, a minor incident in the first weeks of a long war. Its importance was that it struck a major blow at the strategic and tactical concepts on which the Royal Air Force had based itself for twenty years – although its leaders declined to see the battle in these terms. The Wilhelmshaven raid was the beginning of the confrontation between the theory and practice of warfare that would dominate the long campaign of Bomber Command.

1 » IN THE BEGINNING, TRENCHARD
     
    BRITISH BOMBER POLICY, 1917–40
     
From the time when the first experiments were made in air power during the First World War until the great Bomber Command attack on Dresden and the discharge of the first atomic bombs by the USAAF thirty years later, the whole development and direction of strategic bombing was a highly and continuously controversial matter . . . The controversy raged over the whole field of the offensive which embraced questions of strategic desirability, operational possibility, economic, industrial and moral vulnerability, and legal and moral responsibility . . .
– Official History of the Strategic Air Offensive against Germany 1939–45 1
    One clear May morning in 1917, a formation of German Gotha bombers droned high over the Kent coastal town of Folkestone and the neighbouring army camp of Shornecliffe. In the few minutes that followed, their bombs killed 95 people and injured 175. The seventy-four British aircraft which took off to intercept them were able to shoot down only one Gotha. Three weeks later, on 17 June, twenty-one Gothas mounted a second daylight attack. Seven bombers attacked small towns in Kent and Essex, while the remaining fourteen flew on in diamond formation to attack London itself. 162 people were killed and 432 injured. A third attack on 7 July killed 65 people and injured 245. It was the inauguration of strategic airbombardment, the first significant attempt by an air force to take advantage of this third dimension of warfare to pass above protecting armies and navies and strike direct at the nation of the enemy.
    The consternation, indeed panic, provoked by the German attack was considerably greater among British politicians and in the press than among Britons at large. All governments in wartime are nervous about the effects of unexpected shocks on national morale, and the Gothas came at a moment when mounting war-weariness was apparent in Britain. The bombings seemed to signal the inception of a new, ghastly age, vividly foretold as far back as 1908 by England’s most celebrated contemporary prophet, H. G. Wells, in his book The War in the Air . Extraordinary efforts were made to strengthen the air defences, especially around London. Fighters were recalled from France. Guns and searchlights were deployed for the first time in depth. Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, appointed himself and one of the Empire’s foremost heroes, the rehabilitated Boer General Smuts, as a committee of two, to study how best Britain’s air forces could be reorganized to meet the German threat; above all, to consider whether the national interest was best served by maintaining the air forces as subordinate corps within the British Army and Royal Navy. In the event, Smuts conducted the inquiry single-handed, with the assistance of army and Royal Flying Corps officers. The Smuts Report, as it became known, inspired the creation of the Royal Air Force as an independent service alongside the army and navy. More than this, Smuts sowed the germ of the seed of the vast British strategic air