ABSTRACT
On 8 October 1914 Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had directed four aeroplanes of the Royal Navy Air Service (RNAS) to bomb Cologne in the first British bomb attack of the Great War. Minor damage was caused to a railway station. Twentyeight years later on 30 May 1942 Churchill, as prime minister, authorised the first 1,000-bomber air raid of the Second World War. The target was again Cologne, but on this occasion the entire city was laid waste. The significant growth in air power between the two air raids reflected the development of a strategic air force in Britain and faith in a bomber offensive as a means to win the war by air power alone. The potential of bombers to attack the enemy beyond the conventional front line was first raised in October 1916 by General Bares of the French Air Service. A year later the idea of a strategic bomber fleet was taken up and formally presented to the British war cabinet by General Jan Christian Smuts. The outcome, on 1 April 1918, was the formation of the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a wholly independent branch of the British armed forces. The war ended on 11 November 1918 before the RAF could put the theory of strategic bombing to the test, but in 1922 the RAF successfully bombed and defeated Kurdish independence forces in Iraq and promoted the concept of bombers as an all-powerful and unstoppable force. The Italian military theorist General Giulio Douhet, in his treatise Il Dominio dell ‘Aria (The Command of the Air) published in 1921, articulated the potential of a bomber offensive to win wars independently. Douhet predicted that future wars would be won by fleets of battle planes that could reach over the heads of a defending army or navy to destroy the heartland of the enemy and thereby force surrender. No country was expected to be able to sustain the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from bomb attacks directed against vulnerable city populations, or the wholesale destruction of industry. The first chief of staff of the RAF, Hugh Trenchard (1919-29), arrived at similar conclusions and lobbied for the development of a fleet of heavy bombers to become Britain’s first line of defence. He regarded bombers as a future deterrent force and sought to usurp the traditional role of the battleships of the Royal Navy as the principal guardians of the British Isles. Beyond Britain, only the United States, under the enthusiastic influence of Brigadier-General William (Billy) Mitchell, considered the doctrine of a strategic bomber force. His ideas were initially rejected but later took root around the concept of precision bombing and the development of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber in 1937. The more common military strategy was for aircraft to act in direct support of army and navy operations. This strategy was honed in Nazi Germany into the offensive strategy of blitzkreig whereby the Luftwaffe attacked in unison with ground forces to subdue and overwhelm the enemy. Hence the Luftwaffe never invested
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conquest of Poland in 1939 and western Europe in 1940.
