The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941. By Brett Holman.

Abstract

Imaginings of future war changed considerably over the first 40 years of the twentieth century, not least due to the ascent of the aeroplane. The Next War in the Air analyses the origins and evolution of the theory of the knock-out blow from the air, as well as the proposed responses to that threat, expressed by civilian authors in airpower literature and novels. It also explores newspapers’ communication of these ideas to the British public. The first section details the development of the theory of the knock-out blow. The idea was visible in fiction before 1914, but the Great War evidenced the costs of the industrialized battlefront, the importance of the home front, and air power’s potential to blur the distinction between the two. Holman suggests that military theorists might have been influenced by civilian airpower writers, particularly Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper, who were the first to develop coherent theories of the knock-out blow. They theorized that the next war would be won from the air; almost without warning, a nation’s cities, and therefore civilians and morale, could be quickly paralyzed by aerial bombers, leading to quick victory without the attrition of the Western Front. The only defence would be deterrence. By 1935, readers of airpower literature would have found concern about German rearmament and the potential for commercial planes to be easily converted into effective bombers, and the widespread belief that the bomber would always get through. The use of airpower to attack civilians in Abyssinia, Spain, and China was initially taken to support the theory, but by 1938, airpower writers questioned the impossibility of defence, observing that against fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft defences, bombers had been proven vulnerable while civilian morale had not. By 1940, civilian airpower writers asserted that the knock-out blow would be repelled, and Holman argues that here too they were ahead of military thinkers.