I.
Clausewitz fights at Borodino. He retreats with the Russian army as Moscow burns. At Waterloo, he sees Napoleonic France destroyed only when the army is destroyed on the field. The principle of decisive battle will become the most influential in military strategy for the next century and a half. “War is an act of force” to disarm the enemy, and “there is no logical limit to the application of that force.”
II.
Joseph Stalin addresses the Red Army in 1930: “In the capitalist countries [there is] a barrier separating the people from the army. How is it with us? On the contrary, the people and the army constitute a single whole, a single family.” Ernst Junger, also in 1930: “The new form of armament, in which we have for some time already been implicated, must be a mobilization of the German. Nothing else.”
III.
By 1934, the Luftwaffe plans to acquire a force of 822 bombers. The technical office under Wilhelm Wimmer gives bombers the highest development priority. An RAF manual of doctrine, written in 1936, states: “The bomb is the chief weapon of an air force and the means by which it may attain its aim in war.” It aims for 758 medium bombers by 1939. The US Army Air Corps GHQ under General Frank Andrews writes “the backbone of air power is bombardment aviation, for that is the type which can exert pressure on the enemy through the destructive effect of its bombing.” Boeing’s XB-17 wins the USAAC design competition in 1936. It carries a payload of 3,000 pounds of bombs and has a maximum range of 3,000 miles.
IV.
Before 1939 every national air wing acknowledges the taboo of civilian targets. The Luftwaffe’s “Conduct of Aerial Warfare” states “attacks against cities made for the purpose of inducing terror are to be avoided on principle.” But for each force, marshalling yards, government administration centers, railways, power systems, food sources, harbors and industry are valid targets. Civilians often live among them. Throughout the 1930’s, US Army Air Corps officers study the United States’s strategic targets to wargame the decisive destruction of a nation’s will. The Luftwaffe conducts wargames which illustrate the use of bombers in producing decisive results in conjunction with army maneuvers. The RAF develops strategic target lists in Germany as early as 1937.
V.
Each future belligerent knows a bomber is only as useful as its ability to place bombs on target. The American Norden bombsight weighs forty pounds and has thousands of moving parts. It adjusts for altitude, windspeed, airspeed, and attitude and can be integrated with autopilot. American pilots relentlessly drill navigation. The Germans have the Lofte 7 series bombsight, but it has no internal gyroscope and cannot be integrated well with autopilot. They do, however, have a radar beam navigation system called the “X-gerat”, which allows a bomber to fly within a hundred yards of his target, day or night, in any weather conditions. Wimmer’s replacement as Chief of the Technical Office of the Luftwaffe, Ernst Udet, issues an alteration to bomber development: all new designs must be capable of dive-bombing, which is understood to be far more accurate. The four-engine He-177, ready for serial production in 1939 and perhaps the equal of the B-17, is delayed for three years to comply with the desired specifications. Udet will commit suicide in 1941.
VI.
The RAF tries to hone its techniques over England, in good weather and during the day, and discovers that even with training the mean success rate of its exercises is 3 hits out of 100 within 200 yards of undefended targets. They use almost the same bombsights as they had in World War I. Their fleet of Blenheims and Whitleys are slow and do not have sufficient range for the strategic campaign envisioned by men like Hugh Trenchard and Charles Portal.
VII.
War in Ethiopia! The Italian Reggio Aeronautica utilizes the Caproni Ca. 133 light transport craft to bomb (with incendiaries, high explosives and phosphene gas) retreating Ethiopian columns, the city of Addis Ababa and according to the inflamed international press, Red Cross Aid stations. Haile Selassie gives a testimony of the attacks at the League of Nations in Geneva in June 1936. Ethiopia capitulates eight months later.
VIII.
In the spring of 1937, the Condor Legion, fighting for the Nationalists in Spain, hits a crossroads in a Basque village with Junkers 87 Stuka dive bombers and Heinkel 111 medium bombers. The objective is to prevent the retreat of 23 Republican battalions in Bilbao. A further two battalions are quartered in the town; it is a valid military target by any nation’s standard. The town center is destroyed, the sacred oak of the Basque people is blown into splinters, and some 300 civilians die in the operation. The international press claims upwards of 2,000 dead, some half of the population, and the number sticks for eighty years. Pablo Picasso immortalizes the incident in his painting “Guernica.” The world believes the Luftwaffe capable of leveling cities, and this belief indelibly influences force composition and doctrine. The Luftwaffe takes other lessons from the Spanish Civil War; they watch the Reggio Aeronautica try and fail to bomb Barcelona into submission over the course of three days, inflicting over 3,300 casualties. International opinion is outraged, and enemy morale is raised rather than subdued.
IX.
The Luftwaffe commands the skies over Poland throughout Fall 1939. Rail yards, armored columns, artillery installations, retreating troops, and mobilized reserves are all targets. Bombers fly two to three sorties per day. Warsaw is pounded ahead of the entrance of the army. Civilians die, hospitals are destroyed, and the Royal Palace goes up in flame – so do infantry and artillery companies hidden in the city. The world is mortified.
X.
In April 1940, the RAF hits occupied Oslo with bombs for two and a half hours. Then the RAF hits the undefended town of Heide in northern Germany. Germany issues a warning against the bombing of civilian targets. The British deny publicly that Heide was a target; privately they realize their bombers had gotten lost. On a mission to bomb an airfield in Holland, a Whitley from RAF 10 Squadron, Yorkshire, gets lost in cloud, mistakes the Thames for the Rhine, and bombs an RAF fighter airfield. The friendly fire does little damage. Air Marshal Sir John Slessor writes later: “It must be admitted that our imagination was not sufficiently flexible and our experience too limited… Our faith in the bomber was intuitive, an article of faith.”
XI.
After the Battle of France, Winston Churchill is elevated to prime minister and promises, to the dismay of many in his own government and in the Third Reich, to refuse all peace negotiations and fight the Germans in all sorts of places including streets and fields. London is bombed. Berlin is bombed. Hitler threatens to wipe British cities off the map in response; Coventry is hit on November 14th. The targets are munitions factories and metal-working shops. The city center is completely destroyed, and 800 civilians are killed. A month later, Bomber Command hits Mannheim with bombers loaded primarily with incendiaries. The target is the city itself.
XII.
Almost exactly one year earlier, a similar situation unfolds on the other side of the world and presages the character of the air war to come. A belligerent power, Japan, facing a hopeless strategic situation, resorts to strategic airpower to put pressure on their enemy. The Chinese government and much of its military had retreated very far inland, too far for army maneuvers, to the city of Chongqing. The Japanese target is the city itself, “to shake the Chiang regime from the sky.” At its height, Operation 100 involves over 200 Mitsubishi G3M “Nell” medium bombers committed to crushing the will of the Kuomintang to fight. Over the course of two years, nearly 12,000 civilians die. The Kuomintang provisional councilors, speaking for the people, the nation, issue a statement: “the grudge [the Japanese] have planted in our minds with the bombings will not be erased, even after a hundred years.”
This reinforces the impression I got from reading "Human Smoke" that the RAF was amazingly incompetent.