Dresden (12 page)

Another politician, a rising star who first entered the cabinet in his thirties, and had both run ministries and fought on the western front as a commander, took a more jaundiced view:

That prescient politician was the forty-three-year-old minister of munitions—soon secretary of state for air—Winston Churchill. Both he and Weir were to be proved right. But then who could imagine the sheer destructive power that within less than a generation would come pouring from the sky?

 

AFTER THE WAR ENDED,
Sir Hugh (later Lord) Trenchard had to fight for the newly found RAF's independence with all the energy and cunning at his disposal.

Germany was soon largely disarmed. With the most important military threat to Britain removed, the RAF's political masters seriously considered dissolving its strength back into the army and navy whence it had come. Part of the reason for the RAF's survival, however, came from its potential usefulness in sorting out minor but irksome trouble elsewhere in the world. In December 1919 Churchill told the House of Commons, “The first duty of the Royal Air Force is to garrison the British Empire.”

Sure enough, a three-week campaign crushed Muslim rebels in Somaliland, a victory gained by a single RAF squadron operating in tandem with the Camel Corps. The entire campaign cost 70,000 pounds. In comparison with the process of importing, feeding, and housing troops, and then stationing them wherever the trouble might be repeated, this was sensationally reasonably priced, and in the aftermath of the most expensive war in Britain's history, cheap was what the running of the empire needed to be. In March 1921, at a conference in Cairo, it was agreed that British control of Iraq would henceforth be based on the RAF squadrons stationed there. On the northeast frontier of India, where for the past hundred years British and loyal Indian armies had bled to death in incessant struggles with the fiercely independent tribesmen of the area, RAF planes could also enforce “order” at the drop of a leaflet or, if necessary, a string of bombs.

When the Geddes Commission was formed to enforce harsh savings on government departments in those bleak postwar years, Trenchard, a wily political operator, finally saved his baby by uttering magic words of parsimony in its defense, insisting that the RAF was “our cheapest form of defence.” Further supported by Churchill against the machinations of the army and navy, both of which wanted their air arms back, by 1922 Trenchard and the RAF were safe both from the budget cutters and their rivals in other services. The era of independent air power had begun.

Trenchard's role as founder of the RAF, followed by his long reign as its commander, meant that the new force was inevitably his creature. The atmosphere was less stuffy than in the army or navy. Technical knowl
edge was all-important. This was a force made up not of cannon fodder but of technocrats. Trenchard also dictated another trend in the new air force. His experience in the First World War had convinced him that air power was the answer to victory in future wars, that through attacking the enemy's hinterland, the bloody deadlock that had cost millions of young men's lives between 1914 and 1918 could be broken. Trenchard wrote: “It is on the destruction of enemy industries and, above all, on the lowering of morale…caused by bombing that ultimate victory rests.” When asked why Britain did not build up a purely defensive air force, he responded with typical conviction:

These arguments, shorn of sporting metaphors, were the foundation of the notorious “moral bombing” doctrine, as well as of the conviction that nations could (contrary to what Churchill had written five years earlier) be forced into surrender by relentless air attacks alone. Trenchard was almost certainly thinking of the French when he expressed his forthright, sometimes chillingly practical opinions, for France was in the mid-1920s the only power with which Britain might conceivably engage in military conflict. “The nation that would stand being bombed the longest would win in the end,” he said, adding: “The French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did.” Trenchard included a prophetic rider in his observations about the primacy of bombing policy that would often be forgotten in the war to come. “In the future,” he said, “increased means of defense may redress the balance.”

Trenchard's doctrines took little account of the possibility of civilian casualties. The First World War had seen nations locked in life-or-death conflict. The war had witnessed unrestricted submarine warfare on the part of the Germans, leading to the deaths of thousands of civil
ians through the sinking of merchant shipping and passenger liners, and it had seen the beginnings of massed air attacks on enemy cities by both sides. Both sides had made attempts to starve each other out—treating the entire populations of their countries as if they were the inhabitants of medieval fortresses. In this the British, with an all-powerful surface fleet enforcing their blockade against the Central Powers (as Germany and Austria-Hungary were known), had been the more successful. Hundreds of thousands of enemy noncombatants died of malnutrition and disease brought on by shortages of food and other necessities. Even in Britain, massive sinking of merchant ships by the Germans' U-boat fleet had caused widespread shortages of imported foodstuffs. There was a sense of enemy civilian life being held cheap in a way that just a decade earlier would have been inconceivable.

As Trenchard put it when he addressed the Imperial Defence College in 1927:

Even more extreme were the views of the Italian army officer General Giulio Douhet. Douhet briefly (1913–14) served as director of the Italian army's aviation section before mysterious disciplinary hearings led to his transfer back to ground duties (some authorities have even suggested that he never learned to fly). He nevertheless caused a great stir with his book
The Command of the Air
, first published in 1921. The book attracted considerable attention, which led to the appointment of Douhet, an enthusiastic fascist, as undersecretary for air in Mussolini's first government.

Douhet argued that the invention of aircraft rendered all previous military thought irrelevant. Again, memories of the nightmare stale
mate of the First World War, which haunted the minds of so many in the 1920s, could cause this to be viewed as something perversely like a blessing. No longer would millions of the nation's young men be doomed in inconclusive battles on land—the bomber would break the deadlock with its ability to deliver devastating attacks on enemy cities and industrial centers. Land forces would be needed principally to occupy and patrol enemy territory after the bombers had forced its surrender.

Douhet considered the large-scale slaughter of civilians to be perfectly justified. To this end, he was prepared to countenance the use not just of bombs, but of poison gas. Even more forcefully than Trenchard, he took his fundamental idea and carried it to its logical (and amoral) conclusion. Unlike Trenchard, Douhet appeared to rejoice in the apocalyptic visions his work induced in the minds of an appalled world. He also believed that the strategy could only work if the enemy's own offensive air capacity was first negated (by destruction of its air force on the ground) and then never allowed to rise again, thus leaving its cities permanently defenseless against the free-ranging bombers that would induce rapid surrender.

Douhet declared with characteristic ruthlessness that attacks from the air should be directed “against organs which are vulnerable both physically and morally, and which are…in no position to defend themselves through combat or counter-attack.”

The gas attack that would achieve this total annihilation of the enemy's capacity to resist would be carried out with liquids that would “slowly emit gas, thus poisoning the atmosphere for weeks.” Douhet spelled out the full horror of this in a final dramatic denouement:

Douhet's book was not translated into English until 1942, and most of the Trenchard-style bombing doctrines were already in circulation before its first publication—after all, notions of breaking stalemates and destroying the enemy's hinterland were quite widespread during and immediately after the First World War. But his writings have a terrifying quality, which perhaps owes something to the aggressively antihumanistic foundations of fascist thought. Douhet's doctrine matches the machinelike, impersonal quality of high-altitude bombing like no other writer's. This is the bomber as weapon of terror, plainly expressed in word and thought. On the other hand, Trenchard's ideas, and even Douhet's, could be seen as having deterrence at their heart. The reasoning went: So terrible would be the damage the bombers would inflict that in the future no sane leader could envisage unleashing a European war.

The only alternative to deterrence was abolition, banning of the bomber weapon. But the conferences held to that end under the auspices of the League of Nations brought no practical results. A conference of jurists at The Hague in 1923, convened by the Western powers, proposed a ban on bombing purely as a means of terrorizing civilian populations. No government had or would ever publicly admit bombing enemy territory to that end alone. Far more subversive, therefore, was the conference's proposal that air raids against military targets should be permitted only if they avoided all damage against civilians. In practice, this would have permitted bombing only of battlefield targets or of military and industrial installations well outside towns or cities, thus nullifying most of the advantages of possessing a bomber fleet. The proposals were never ratified. For the next twenty years legal arguments about air power consisted of attempts to force pre-1900 rules of war into some kind of fit with the new realities of massive, geographically unlimited destruction. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the argument is still going on. As a modern airwar specialist writes:

In other words, it is a law of war (in the scientific rather than the judicial sense) that unless overwhelming deterrence is in place, a power will use whatever weapons it possesses to achieve its objective. And the objective is victory, as cheaply bought (in terms of the belligerent's own reserves of lives and treasure) as can be managed.

 

ON APRIL
26, 1937,
a town of seven thousand people in the Basque country of northern Spain was subjected to an air attack that would shock the world. It would remain notorious, despite all the horrors since witnessed, more than sixty years later. The name of the town was Guernica.

In July 1936 a reactionary Spanish army commander, General Francisco Franco, had raised the standard of rebellion against the country's democratically elected leftist government. Supported with arms and men by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, Franco had nevertheless failed to win a swift victory, and as fighting dragged on into 1937, Spain remained locked in a bloody fratricidal struggle between Nationalists (Franco's forces) and Republicans (government supporters) that had already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of its people.

Guernica lay ten miles from the front line in a war involving Spaniards against Spaniards, but the forty-three aircraft that took off that day were not Spanish. Their young pilots formed the core of the new German Luftwaffe, operating under the cover of an entity called the Condor Legion. This consisted of around one hundred aircraft—four bomber and four fighter squadrons—commanded by Major General Hugo Sperrle and Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen (a cousin of the great First World War fighter ace known as the Red Baron). Both were to play a major role in the Luftwaffe during the Second World War. There was also a tank unit, led by Colonel von Thoma, later commander of the Afrika Korps. Formally under the rebel General Franco's command (and justified as a response to the International Brigades fighting on the Republican side), the Condor Legion had the unadmitted function to “blood” the Luftwaffe's young
pilots and to test out the Nazi state's new aircraft and weapons on real targets and live human animals.