September 8, 2007
The Blitz Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:55 PM EST The homepage of this website notes that today is the anniversary of the beginning of the Blitz, the Luftwaffe’s sustained bombing campaign against London that began on September 7, 1940. There would be raids on London for the next 57 days, and if you discount one raid-free night where the Luftwaffe was prevented from attacking by miserable weather, there would be 76 days of uninterrupted bombing. Before September 7, the Germans had attacked London’s civilian population only incidentally, or by pure accident. On September 5, however, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to make London the main focus of its attacks, and on the 7th, 300 bombers escorted by 600 fighters attacked by day, with another 180 bombers attacking that night, between them killing 436 Londoners and wounding 1,600 more. One intention was to avenge the Royal Air Force’s attack on Berlin of August 25, itself a reprisal for an unauthorized German raid on London the day before. The other intention was to let the Luftwaffe win the war on its own. When the bombing was done, any invasion was expected to be a walkover. There were two targets, one of them being the remaining aircraft of Fighter Command (the much-anticipated “last 50 Spitfires”), which would be forced to deploy over London and be destroyed. The other target was the civilian population of London. The intention was to produce panic and social division, ideally the threat of civil war, which would force the British government into a compromise peace. It was long a commonplace to say that Hitler lost the war when he directed the Luftwaffe away from its previous military and industrial targets and toward a monomaniacal focus on London, and while that is not so obvious, since there was no clear alternate path to a German victory over Britain in 1940, the attack on British morale famously failed. The long-run result of that famous failure is that strategic bombing—attacks on enemy morale, production, or armed forces, made by aircraft alone—has widely come to be considered an inevitable failure. This sturdy judgment, which has handily survived the crucial role strategic air attacks played in securing the surrender of Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Milosevic’s Serbia, along with the indispensable contribution strategic bombing made to the victory over Nazi Germany, encapsulates one of the false notions asserted with eerie confidence by people who are very confident that they are bravely uttering a profound and heretical truth. When directed at civilian morale, the purveyors of the conventional wisdom “know” that strategic bombardment is both an inexcusable crime and a manifest folly; when directed at economic or military targets, at least a folly (and when civilians are killed in the course of such attacks, an outcome which is almost inevitable, the charge of crime is nowadays pretty common). The apostles of strategic bombing, who generally and often grossly overstated the case for their form of warfare, claiming the power to deliver victory unassisted, admittedly bear some of the responsibility for the now widespread dismissal of their form of war. But current specialist scholarship, which has for decades been revising upward our estimate of the contribution strategic bombing made to victory over the Axis, is almost always ignored by people who pronounce on the subject. With the exception of the popular conception of the British World War I experience on the Western Front (“lions led by donkeys”), my guess is that no mistake about war is held by a larger number of educated people.
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