15 - Allied Bombing and the Destruction of German Cities

Summary

We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war.

Air Marshal Harris, April 1942

Nothing better fitted the newly defined concept of “total war” after 1918 than the advent of offensive air power. “Total war, made possible by the aeroplane,” wrote Bernard Davy, a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1941, “has reversed all the traditional concepts of warfare.” The bomber airplane was widely regarded as the fullest expression of the new age of mass war, directed at soldiers as well as civilians, at the enemy armed forces as well as the social and economic fabric that nourished them. When Lord Tedder, Eisenhower's deputy in the invasion of Western Europe, reflected on the nature of war in a series of lectures at Cambridge in 1947, he argued that military operations were now “merely one of the methods” by which a nation imposes its will on another and “not an end in themselves.” Air power made possible other forms of warfare: “the political war which aims at weakening morale and authority. . .; the economic war which aims at starving the enemy war production of its essential materials.” Tedder, a senior air force officer himself, arrived at the not unexpected conclusion that air power was the arm peculiarly suited to exert pressure on the political and economic fabric of an enemy state.