ABSTRACT
The shadow of the bomber was not a constant presence in the British consciousness. Its threat first had to be constructed by airpower writers. The early imaginings of novelists in the 1890s bore little resemblance to later predictions of the impact of airpower: their solitary airships were feeble in comparison. Beginning in the late 1900s, various writers – most importantly, H.G. Wells and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu – began to construct the foundations of what later became the knock-out blow theory. Some of them foresaw surprise attacks by large aerial fleets, which would terrorise civilians, destroy key nerve centres, or simply turn cities into rubble. Other key ideas which began to emerge before the First World War included the belief that London was an especially vulnerable target, that civilians were prone to panic, and that there was no defence against air attack. But there was little consistency or consensus: nobody put these ideas together into a coherent theory. There was little notion that airpower could win wars by itself, and aerial warfare was itself still merely a theoretical proposition.
