Attrition in the Second World War: The strategic bombing of Germany

Abstract

The changing attitudes to the British bomber offensive against Germany provide a clear example of distortion in hindsight. There were a few pacifist or near pacifist critics during the war but in general the campaign received public support. In the immediate post-war years there was some criticism, mostly on operational grounds, but also a strong show of resentment at the way Bomber Command and Sir Arthur Harris had been slighted in post-war commemorations and honours. Since the 1960s, however, there has been widespread condemnation of the campaign for a complex and sometimes muddled combination of moral, strategic and political reasons. In principle a critical reappraisal is entirely legitimate, but in some cases there has been a marked lack of historical understanding and empathy, both as regards the fraught conditions in which decisions were made and the operational problems in implementing them. There is a certain irony in the tendency to exaggerate Britain’s contribution to the defeat of Germany, in comparison to those of the United States and the Soviet Union, while underrating, and even condemning, Britain’s principal offensive achievement: namely the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. British opinion at all levels has been deeply affected by the pervasive arguments propagated in the inter-war decades about the omnipotence of the bomber and fear that the next major war would begin with immediate cataclysmic bombing of cities with high explosives and poison gas. British governments, and more especially the Royal Air Force as the interested Service struggling to maintain its independent status, had placed great emphasis on Bomber Command, primarily as a deterrent to enemy air attack, but also as a counter-weapon should deterrence fail. In the late 1930s, however, a much higher priority was given to fighter aircraft for home defence, and little thought was given to the huge problems involved in penetrating distant enemy defences, locating legitimate targets and hitting them with sufficiently heavy bombs to inflict significant damage. Consequently when war came Bomber Command was completely unprepared to carry out its offensive role; but in any case Neville Chamberlain’s government during the months of ‘phoney war’ proved unwilling to initiate the bombing of Germany (‘taking the gloves off’ in the idiom of the day) for fear of provoking enemy retaliation. Britain and France generally observed these self-imposed restrictions on bombing, which were confined to clearly defined and specific military targets.