The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

This perception of bombing serves to explain the wide gap between the strategic vision at the heart of the interwar RAF and the reality of British bombing capability and defense strategy in the 1930s. Imperial air policing was undertaken in conditions of clear visibility, little or no opposition, and low-level attack, none of which would be true of an aerial offensive undertaken in Europe. As a result, colonial practice did not persuade Britain’s military leaders to bank everything on the bomber. Indeed, fear of bombing, particularly once Hitler’s Germany had been identified in the mid-1930s as the most likely potential enemy, acted as a powerful spur to change British priorities in the air to one that was more appropriately defensive. When the military Joint Planning Committee was asked in 1934 to estimate the probable effects of a German “knockout blow” from the air, it was assumed that a week of bombing would produce 150,000 casualties and render millions homeless. Later estimates by the chiefs of staff continued to assume that these statistics were realistic—more than a match for the alarmist literature of the age.58 In 1937 the newly appointed minister for the coordination of defense, Sir Thomas Inskip, told the RAF that the role of the air force was not to inflict a knockout blow on the enemy (which it was incapable of doing) “but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.”59 The Committee of Imperial Defence spelled out guidelines for air strategy in which the air...