Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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388 michael richards
of the inexorable march of fascism to which the Popular Front, in Spain and else-
where, had been the principal democratic response.
Conclusions: Decline of the Popular Front, 1937–1939
In both France and Spain, therefore, the inherent divergences of the Popular Front,
partly because of external circumstances, could not be suppressed. The historian Marc
Bloch, who lived through the years of the Front and its tragic aftermath, explained
how quickly “it expired in spirit if not in form, a victim of the equivocations of its
supporters and of the obstructions and contempt of its enemies.”
16
In late September
1936 the reticence of French business forced Blum to devalue the French franc and
in December the PCF abstained from a parliamentary vote of confidence on the Blum
government. By February 1937 the government was settling merely for consolidation
and retrenchment. When in June 1937 the Senate refused to grant Blum decree
powers to deal with the financial crisis, France’s first Popular Front government
resigned. Its Radical successor struggled on until January 1938. Blum’s second
government, in March 1938, lasted only a month. In the aftermath of the Anschluss
between Germany and Austria, a conservative government under Edouard Daladier
took office. The demise of the Popular Front was thus consummated amid the
appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini. In September 1938 the French government,
with the British, signed the Munich Agreement to partition Czechoslovakia. By the
time of General Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War in April 1939 the Spanish
Popular Front had long ceased to exist, except as a requirement of war mobilization.
The Nazi–Soviet pact, signed in August 1939, formally ended the Comintern’s search
for collective security and paved the way for the dismemberment of Poland.
The Popular Front in Europe represented an uneasy compromise between political
necessities in the age of the masses and a mission to preserve parliamentary democ-
racy. A central weakness was that the Comintern played a substantial role in pushing
the notion of cross-class unity for the sake of Soviet security, while believing neither
in bourgeois democracy nor in revolution. Theoretically, the lessons of Germany in
the period 1929–33 could be learned, but the experience of power would heighten
the contradictions of interclass unity. The various compromises became a huge
problem in the exercise of political power in France and Spain when the Popular
Front formed the basis of reforming governments that aimed simultaneously to
achieve progressive change in the interests of the popular classes and halt the rise of
fascism. The ultimate failure of the Front, wrecked by the unbearable pressures it
had to resist, symbolized the failure and defeat of European liberalism and the
European left. This defeat contributed in a very real sense to the onset of the
European war in 1939.
NOTES
1 While “fascism” (lower case “f ”) refers to the
generic form of extreme nationalist–racial
ideology and action in Europe, “Fascism” (upper case “F”) refers specifically to the Party,
regime, and state in Italy (or part thereof ), 1922–45. The generic notion of
fascism, as
used in this essay, incorporates Nazism.
the popular front 389
2 Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989), p. 266.
3 See Santos Juliá, “The Origins of the Spanish Popular Front,” in
The French and Spanish
Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives, M. Alexander and H. Graham, eds (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 29.
4 M. Azaña,
Obras completas, vol. 3 (Mexico: Ediciones Oasis, 1967), p. 292.
5 J. Ortega y Gasset,
The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
6 Stephen Spender, “I Join the Communist Party,”
Daily Worker, February 19, 1937,
reproduced in Stephen Spender, The Thirties and After (Glasgow: Collins, 1978), pp.
80–2.
7 “Les problèmes de l’unité,”
Le Populaire, July 7, 1934, in L’Oeuvre de Léon Blum, vol.
4, part 1 (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1964), p. 157.
8 Cited in Joel Colton,
Léon Blum, Humanist in Politics (Cambridge MA: MIT Press,
1974), pp. 109–10.
9 See Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew,
The Comintern: A History of International
Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 124–5.
10 Marc Bloch,
L’Étrange défaite: Témoignage écrit en 1940, 2nd edn (Paris: Armand Colin,
1957), cited in Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), p. 188.
11 Hearing before the Supreme Court at Riom, March 11–12, 1942,
L’Oeuvre de Léon Blum,
vol. 4, part 2, pp. 259, 327.
12 Azaña,
Obras completas, vol. 3, p. 602.
13 See Paul Preston, “The Creation of the Popular Front in Spain,” in
The Popular Front
in Europe, H. Graham and P. Preston, eds (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 99.
14 See Juliá, “Origins,” p. 33.
15 See Helen Graham,
The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
16 Fink,
Marc Bloch, p. 197.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Martin S. Alexander and Helen Graham, eds, The French and Spanish Popular Fronts:
Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). An essential col-
lection of essays by leading scholars comparing the politics and culture of the Popular
Fronts.
David Beetham, ed., Marxists in Face of Fascism (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1983). Indispensable collection of writings on fascism by Marxists in the period 1922–38,
with a critical introduction.
Edward. H. Carr, The Twilight of Comintern, 1930–1935 (London: Macmillan, 1982). A
detailed study of the Comintern at work in the 1930s.
Joel Colton, Léon Blum, Humanist in Politics (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1974). First pub-
lished in 1966, a political biography which focuses on Blum’s humane qualities pitted against
the great conflicts of 1934 to 1945.
Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002). An extended study of the wartime experience of the Republic, stressing pre-
existing political tensions that made the Popular Front problematic as a basis for wartime
mobilization.
Helen Graham and Paul Preston, eds, The Popular Front in Europe (London: Macmillan,
1987). Including a useful introductory summary, this places the Popular Front within politi-
cal tensions of the interwar period and looks at each significant country in turn.
390 michael richards
Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–
1939 (London: Macmillan, 1984). Standard work on the security rationale as the basis of
Stalin’s support for the Popular Front line.
Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–38 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988). Thematic and historiographical study concentrating on
the relationship between culture and politics in France in the 1930s.
Santos Juliá, Orígenes del Frente Popular en España (1934–1936) (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno,
1979). Focusing on the specifically Spanish origins of the Popular Front in Spain. A useful
summary can be found in Alexander and Graham, The French and Spanish Popular Fronts,
above.
Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism
from Lenin to Stalin (London: Macmillan, 1996). Narrative and interpretive account drawing
on research carried out since the opening of Soviet archives.
Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the
Second Republic (London: Methuen, 1983). Detailed account of the political origins of the
civil war, focusing on the struggle for state power between the PSOE and CEDA.
Sian Reynolds, France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996).
Places gender at the center of analysis of political, cultural, and economic change.
Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Major study of the German social crisis
and left political divisions on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Strategic Revolution
Tami Davis Biddle
When Napoleon stunned the heads of Europe with a string of seemingly unstoppable
victories at the dawn of the nineteenth century, he had done so by relying on means
and methods of warfare that were largely familiar to the military officers of the day.
Surely, he had refined them, honed them, and opened up vast new opportunities by
presiding over an army that was, initially at least, committed to an ideological cause.
But Napoleon fought his battles in a way that would have been quite recognizable
to generations of officers before him. A century later, warfare had changed so dra-
matically that Napoleon himself would not have recognized it. The speed, range, and
accuracy of small arms and long-range artillery had undergone radical transformation,
producing a battlefield environment that was vastly more lethal than it had ever been
before.
The years leading up to 1914 had seen sweeping, dramatic change in the
tools of modern warfare. The industrial revolution had placed a great array of new,
highly destructive weapons in the hands of the military. This same revolution
had allowed for the equipping, clothing, and supporting of the mass armies that
would eventually march off to war. Those large armies were the result not only of
the increased nationalism and militarism of the late Victorian and Edwardian
eras, but also of the basic changes in sanitation and sewage that had reduced disease
in Europe and thus made possible a dramatic increase in population. The new
weapons arriving on the battlefield – especially the tank and the airplane – changed
the look and feel of modern warfare. At sea the submarine had the same effect.
All three weapons would make their presence felt even more dramatically between
1939 and 1945, forcing armies and navies to make ongoing, sweeping changes in
their conduct of warfare.
During the interwar years Europe witnessed, for a time at least, a social and cultural
rejection of the politics and militarism that had paved the way to the “Great War.”
But the twenty years between the two world wars did not see a halt in the evolution
of the tools and technology of warfare. This was true despite a serious attempt to
de-claw Germany through the Versailles treaty, and despite several sweeping attempts
at disarmament and arms control. This chapter will examine the “strategic revolution”
392 tami davis biddle
that first manifested itself during the Great War, and continued through the conclu-
sion of World War II in 1945. It will address the ways that armies and navies adapted
to dramatic change in the scope, methods, and tools of warfare during the first half
of the twentieth century.
Armies and Land Warfare
The central problem facing soldiers at the start of World War I has been summed up
succinctly with a few telling statistics: a Napoleonic infantry battalion of 1,000 men
with smoothbore muskets could project 1,000 rounds to an effective range of 100
yards twice a minute; a bayonet charge by a comparable formation would thus receive
about 2,000 rounds before reaching its target, or about two shots per soldier. By
1916 an infantry battalion with 1,000 magazine rifles and four machine guns could
project over 21,000 rounds to distances over 1,000 yards every minute. An assault
by a comparable unit would thus absorb over 210,000 rounds in the time needed to
close, or more than 200 per targeted soldier – an increase of over two orders of
magnitude.
1
How to cope with this new degree of lethality on the battlefield was the
main issue faced by all World War I generals.
An extraordinarily daunting and difficult problem to solve, it took years – and
millions of lives – before military professionals found their way to an answer. The
problem was complicated and intensified by the powerful synergy that developed
between small arms and long-range artillery and by the primitive state of battlefield
communications. The speed with which these problems could be solved was slowed
by the hierarchical nature of military organizations, by class structures, and by inad-
equate systems of training and education.
Many theories have been advanced to explain the seemingly desultory performance
of World War I armies, particularly on the western front. The best of these combine
an appreciation of the culture of Edwardian-era armies with an appreciation of the
difficulty of the problem they faced. If the World War I generals are still remembered
as “donkeys” who led lions (and if this thesis has been embedded in European
popular culture through literature and the media), a good deal of recent scholarship
has sought to redress it.
2
By the end of 1918, all of the major combatant nations
had come to understand the principles of what one scholar has recently termed the
“modern system” of warfare. These principles enabled soldiers to employ the com-
ponents of industrialized, twentieth-century war fighting – to employ modern “com-
bined arms” – in a sophisticated way.
A means of breaking the western front’s trench stalemate was first demonstrated
by the Germans during the Michael Offensive of March 1918, when they used sur-
prise, suppressive fire, dispersion, cover and concealment, and maneuver to advance
dramatically in a short period of time. These foundational elements of contemporary
land warfare have remained consistent, even as ever more sophisticated weapons have
made their way to battlefields over the past 100 years. And wide-ranging, extensive
developments in communications technology have greatly facilitated the command
and control of large, complex military forces operating over extended areas. But the
principles of modern combined arms warfare require a high degree of professionalism,
discipline, and dedicated training; indeed, their demands are so strenuous that only
a small number of armies have been able to master them fully.
the strategic revolution 393
The thinking and behavior of European armies following the war was influenced
by a number of factors, most notably the political, economic, and social contexts in
which they operated. Having suffered so grievously from 1914 through late 1918,
Europeans were weary of war and anxious to embrace the promise held out by the
League of Nations. If Germany was actively prohibited from keeping a large, standing
army, other nations were disinclined to invest more than necessary in their land forces.
The French, spent by the long, exhausting battle of Verdun in 1916, never fully
recovered from it. After the war they adopted a defensive mentality, hoping to keep
themselves safe through a doctrine of couverture behind the Maginot Line of static
defenses.
Anti-war attitudes and limited budgets shaped the context of the British interwar
army. Neither its analysis of its wartime experience nor its interwar investment in
training and doctrinal rigor was as robust as it might have been. The new states that
emerged from the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire were fully engaged
in trying to develop political and economic stability; they had little energy or funding
left over for their military establishments. Russia, enmeshed in civil war, and, later,
in the ongoing turmoil of the early Stalinist era, saw only halting progress towards
the development of a sophisticated, professionalized army.
Nonetheless, planning for the next war did take place inside European military
organizations. It often proceeded in fits and starts, and was characterized by ongoing
and largely unresolved contests between those who sought radical change and those
who sought to preserve the traditional and the familiar. Among the radicals were
those who became outspoken proponents of armor and battlefield mechanization,
including J. F. C. Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart, and Charles de Gaulle.
The tank was a natural enough response to the lethality of the new battlefield: it
combined protection and firepower in one machine, thus helping to restore move-
ment, and to expand the opportunities for the reconnaissance and exploitation phases
of warfare. But during World War I the tank was primitive, difficult to use, and
mechanically unreliable; it never emerged as a decisive weapon prior to 1918. Its
proponents saw its possibilities, however, and thus promoted it as a central tool of
warfare for the future.
By the start of World War II the British would have the only fully mechanized
army. But British planning was affected by an assumption that the defense would
continue to predominate on land, and conservatives generally won the day over more
radical thinkers. Fuller argued for all-tank formations, and Liddell Hart argued,
somewhat less radically, that tanks and aircraft were the means to restore movement
on the battlefield. He insisted, as well, that tanks could break up enemy lines and
drive deep into the enemy rear to disrupt command and control efforts. But conser-
vatives, who were invested in justifying their wartime tactics, were not generally
moved by these non-traditional ideas; they continued to insist on the predominance
of more traditional means, especially infantry and cavalry. In 1935, twice as much
money was spent on cavalry as on tanks and armored cars.
3
A defensive mindset also infused French interwar thinking. De Gaulle’s arguments
for replacing the large, indifferently trained French conscript army with a smaller,
fully mechanized, more professional one seemed too radical a step to win wide
support in interwar France. By the time World War II commenced, the French had
large numbers of capable tanks, but the doctrine for their employment was defensive
394 tami davis biddle
and limited in imagination. The most innovative tank supporter in the Soviet Union,
Tuchachevsky, perished in Stalin’s political purges.
4
Ironically, the Germans would develop and utilize the power of mechanized forces
most successfully in the early stages of World War II. The small, tightly knit, profes-
sional German army remaining after Versailles engaged in a great deal of analysis and
introspection in the interwar years – far more than their counterparts in the victorious
nations. Innovators like Hans von Seekt and Heinz Guderian laid the groundwork
for a fast-moving, offensive, mechanized style of warfare. Though it would look revo-
lutionary to Germany’s opponents, it was simply a natural evolution of the combined
arms tactics the Germans had worked out by 1918. What became known as Blitzkrieg
or “lightning war” was the utilization of infantry, artillery, armor, and aircraft in
interoperative, mutually supporting ways. It focused on decentralized authority,
flexibility, speed, and exploitation.
5
Employed effectively by a German army that
expanded rapidly between 1933 and 1939, the new vanguard of combined arms warfare
posed a deadly and difficult problem for Germany’s opponents. During World War II,
all other combatant armies in Europe would find themselves working to catch up to
and surpass the Wehrmacht in its employment of mechanized combined arms.
The Germans took advantage of new advances in technology, integrating these into
the combined arms methods they had worked out and improved – through attention
and close study – through the interwar years. Using advanced small arms, powerful
artillery, armor, and aircraft in close support and aerial bombing roles, they quickly
overwhelmed their initial opponents in Poland and France. This placed Britain on the
defensive – fighting for independence and survival in 1940. Through a tenacious fight
during the aerial Battle of Britain they managed to beat off the early advances of the
Luftwaffe, but initially they had no offensive weapon, save for strategic bombers, to
throw against the Germans. The Soviets would find themselves similarly on the defen-
sive in the summer of 1941, well before Stalin had expected that Hitler would violate
the non-aggression pact he had made with the Soviets in 1939. And these two unlikely
Allies – Britain and Russia – against the Axis powers would be joined by the United
States following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December 1941. For much of
the war the Soviets carried the burden of the fighting.
World War II revealed that the tank is utilized best in a combined arms
role; armored forces can take the initiative and can move quickly to exploit break-
throughs; indeed, the psychological impact of a well-coordinated mechanized attack
can be very great. But armor, to function optimally and without vulnerability, needs
support from infantry. Against a well-prepared defender, tank formations lacking
adequate infantry assistance can find themselves strikingly vulnerable – as the British
discovered to their grief during the Goodwood operation in the summer of 1944,
when General Bernard Montgomery sent attackers forward in massed, tank-pure
formations without adequate infantry support. These formations were fatally vulner-
able to dug-in German infantry and anti-tank guns, which the tank crews could
neither see nor suppress. In general, though, mechanization changed the pace and
nature of warfare in dramatic ways.
Forced – in a test of survival – to contend with the pointy end of the German
spear, the Soviets rallied. Using geographical space, a large population, and material
support from the Americans to keep themselves in the fight initially, the Soviets
eventually developed a sophisticated army that was able, in time, to defeat the German
the strategic revolution 395
army at its own game. The vast and complex combined arms contest fought out on
the eastern front drained the fighting strength and endurance of the Wehrmacht,
while the Anglo-Americans hammered the German home front by air, in a prelude
to their own return to Europe with land armies in 1944.
Air Forces
The role of aircraft as weapons of war had engendered a great deal of speculation
through the ages – indeed, such speculation had long predated the first successful
flight of heavier-than-air craft in 1903. When World War I commenced, aircraft were
still primitive machines; constructed of wood, and tied together with wire and baling
twine, they evolved quickly and found their way to a variety of useful roles – from
reconnaissance and artillery spotting to long-range bombing. Even the most conser-
vative soldiers understood that aircraft would afford an unprecedented view of the
battlefield. This they did, making the space above one’s own troops – as well as the
space above the enemy – a valuable and vital commodity. And this, in turn, led quickly
to the development of purpose-built “fighter” aircraft designed to protect one’s own
skies and to penetrate the enemy’s. Reconnaissance aircraft sought to determine the
location of enemy troops, stores, and artillery pieces; they sought, as well, to chart
enemy movement, including the deployment of reserves. Aircraft were used, in addi-
tion, to communicate with troops, and to batter enemy ground offensives through
tactical bombing. Further from the battlefield they could interdict supplies and
disrupt enemy transport and communications.
6
Much of the speculation about aircraft in war, though, had centered on the poten-
tial of long-range or “strategic” bombers. This theorizing had been infused with
drama and emotion. In the abstract, the prospect seemed daunting to say the least:
aircraft might appear from anywhere, at any time, to rain down bombs that the people
below would have no power to stop. The shielding effect of armies and navies would
no longer be relevant, and there would be no adequate place for civilian populations
to shelter or to hide. Some of those who focused on the prospect of such bombing
found compelling the possibility that it might circumvent the ground war by going
straight to a nation’s “vital centers.” In this way, bomber aircraft might – quickly and
single-handedly – collapse the war-fighting infrastructure and will of an enemy state.
The idea was both alluring and terrifying. Some hoped that the laws of war outlined
at international conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907, and the attempts to
stigmatize the bombing of “open cities” from the air, might provide a check on the
use of aircraft in war. Such hopes proved overly optimistic.
7
Popular speculation about the potential effectiveness of long-range bombing
worked hand in hand with the idea that if war by-passed armies and was instead taken
directly to civilians, those civilians might not be able to endure its demands and
deprivations. In Britain, civil strife and industrial crises in the decades leading up to
World War II helped to create a climate receptive to such speculation. How would
industrial labor be carried out? How would order be maintained? Policy makers and
government officials – already worried about the loyalty and stability of their working
classes – had now to ponder the possibility that aerial bombardment of the home
front might help trigger social upheaval in crowded, vulnerable cities. Military author-
ities expressed such concerns as well.
396 tami davis biddle
To a great extent, those who predicted vast results from long-range bombing were
far ahead of available technology. It would take a long time before any state would
develop the numbers of bombers with the necessary range and carrying capacity
required to engage in sustained, effective strategic bombardment. At the end of
World War I no combatant possessed the types or the numbers of bombers needed
to create the kind of havoc and destruction envisioned by the prewar speculators.
Nonetheless, even the very rudimentary trial afforded to this form of war was suffi-
cient to prompt the development of a body of theory that would influence subsequent
thinking.
Early in the war the Germans employed the great airships named for their inven-
tor, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, in air strikes against targets in continental Europe
and Britain.
8
Though the success of the German airship raids on Britain was circum-
scribed by limitations of range and bomb load (and was complicated by army–navy
service rivalry), the zeppelins achieved some notable early successes, causing damage
and disruption in a number of the places they attacked. Over time, British fighters
increasingly were equipped with engines that could propel them up to the altitude
of the zeppelins, while the development of incendiary and explosive-incendiary
bullets made the hydrogen-filled dirigibles extremely vulnerable to attack. In addi-
tion, the British used signals intelligence successfully to identify and intercept airship
flights. While intermittent airship raids continued throughout the war, the threat had
largely abated by the end of 1916. The memory of the early raids, however, lingered
uneasily in the public mind.
Early in the war the French were enthusiastic about the possibility of undermining
the German war effort through aerial attacks. Perhaps this is not surprising in light
of early French enthusiasm for aviation generally, but French bombing theory was
pragmatic – oriented to providing maximum assistance to the ground war. Aircraft
production problems and the increasingly urgent calls from the front lines for aerial
support caused the French program to be scaled back by 1916. Nonetheless, the
French would continue their efforts throughout the war, choosing their targets on
the basis of feasibility and significance to the enemy war effort.
9
The use of long-range bombers in 1917 and 1918 did not have an appreciable
impact on the war’s outcome: small numbers of fitful, sporadic, and often inaccurate
long-range bombing raids inflicted only limited physical damage, and failed to speed
the conclusion of the war through a psychological impact on the bombing victims.
Nonetheless, these so-called “independent” operations affected the course of think-
ing about the potential of long-range bombardment in war, thus shaping perceptions
about how bombers might be used, and what their effects might be, in the future.
In 1917 the Germans began to employ specially designed Gotha and Giant
bombers against Britain. Both were technological marvels for their time; indeed, the
Giant’s 138-foot wing-span was scarcely shorter than that of a World War II-era B-29
bomber. The early attacks on London, carried out in daylight by a handful of bombers
flying in formation and taking advantage of surprise, had an impact disproportionate
to the bomb load they carried. The British fighters that sought to intercept the in-
vaders had little success, causing an indignant public to recall the RNAS’s failure
against the early zeppelin raids.
The German raids had several immediate effects. First, they caused British fighters,
badly needed in France, to be recalled to help defend the home island; second, they
the strategic revolution 397
prompted Britain’s war cabinet to give greater priority to aircraft production; and
third, they set in motion a process which ultimately would result in the establishment
of a separate and independent Royal Air Force.
10
In the meantime, however, British
air defenses improved, and the Germans – frustrated with what were, ultimately,
meager results from the long-range raids – refocused their bombers on more tactical
roles in the European theater.
Major General Hugh Trenchard, formerly of the army’s Royal Flying Corps, came
to head the long-range bombing arm of the new service. Trenchard, who took up
his duties officially in early June 1918, never had more than nine bombing squadrons
available to him – less than a tenth of the total strength of the new RAF. He attempted
genuine strategic bombing only on occasion, instead directing most of his effort to
the interdiction of German rail traffic and strikes on German airfields. Trenchard
realized, though, that he had popular pressure on him to achieve results. In his final
war dispatch, he claimed that he had spread his attacks over as wide an area as possible,
so as to maximize the “moral” (or psychological) effect of bombing, which he esti-
mated to be twenty times the material effect. The British World War I postwar
bombing survey emphasized the moral effect of bombing and the loss of production
caused when workers were moved into air raid shelters. As the postwar chief of air
staff, Trenchard fought for the RAF’s continued independence, holding off army and
navy attempts to regain their air arms.
11
At the end of World War I no consensus on the record and the future of strategic
bombing emerged and (as with land warfare) a running debate ensued between the
advocates of change and the advocates of conservatism. But combat aviation had won
a set of adherents who would, in the interwar years, warn repeatedly of its power and
insist that their own nations maintain an air striking force in order both to deter war
and serve as a first line of defense. These advocates found an audience among a gen-
eration of people who had witnessed the catastrophic impact of industrialized warfare
and who looked forward with awe and trepidation to a future in which bombers
would become larger, faster, and more capable.
During the interwar years flawed assumptions and mistaken projections about the
future filtered and shaped memory. In Britain, for instance, what seemed to linger
prominently in the public mind – and in the military mind as well – was the memory
of the early zeppelin and Gotha–Giant raids; in contrast, the memory of the later
raids – in which the defenders were dominant – seemed to fade. This effect was
perhaps manifested most graphically when the former – and future – prime minister
Stanley Baldwin proclaimed in the House of Commons in 1932 that the bomber
“will always get through.”
British politicians and military officers both had been troubled by the need to
bring fighters back to Britain. After the war, RAF analyses and staff college lectures
devoted much attention to the fact that the German strategic bombing offensives
had, by the end of the war, demanded a significant defensive response in Great
Britain. Trenchard ultimately used this idea as the main driver in his postwar rhetoric,
arguing that, in the event of war, it would be essential to undertake an immediate,
relentless aerial offensive which would cause enemy production losses and would
create overwhelming public demands for protection. Once forced onto the defensive,
the enemy would find himself on a slippery slope from which he would have no hope
of recovery.
12