Page 103 - Airpower in 20th Century - Doctrines and Employment

between “douhetIsm” And “close AIr support”. the germAn AIr wAr doctrIne In world wAr II 103

It was, however, not the attack on Rotterdam, but the military situation that had
drastically deteriorated for England due to the German occupation of the opposite
channel coasts, that triggered the war cabinet’s decision to start the bomb war, the
concept of which had been set up long before. Quite in the spirit of the Trenchard
doctrine, the Royal Air Force attacked the Ruhr area on 15 May 1940, thus beginning
a strategic air war that was no longer directly associated with land or maritime opera-
tions. It was, however, not possible to much longer delay the fast collapse of France
in which the German Air Force played an important role, acquiring air sovereignty
and effectively supporting army operations.
In his directive of 24 May 1940, Hitler fully authorized the German Air Force
“to wage war against the English motherland“. However, this could not be equated
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with the permission to wage an undifferentiated air war. Starting in August 1940, the
attacks of the German Air Force within the scope of the planned German invasion
were initially directed against military targets and the English armaments industry.
On 24 August German aircraft seemingly accidentally dropped bombs on London,
which led to a British retaliatory strike on Berlin. Hitler responded by releasing
London as a target, with the priority targets at first continuing to be war-essential tar-
gets and not the population. Then, there were more bombing raids against a number
of English towns and cities, which were referred to as retaliatory attacks.
Bombing attacks, like for example the one on Coventry in November 1940, were
aimed at eliminating industrial targets of military interest. However, due to British
air defense and difficulties encountered with night target acquisition the result often
was undifferentiated destruction in the target area. After the bombing of the historic
town centers of Lübeck and Rostock by the Royal Air Force, the German Air Force,
in 1942, turned to retaliatory attacks on historic British towns and cities and thus to
undifferentiated air war. For the German towns and cities, the offensive character
of Germany’s own air war doctrine became a serious disadvantage in view of the
ever more destructive Anglo-American bombing attacks. In particular in the Eastern
regions of Germany, little attention had been paid so far to air defense and air raid
protection and now it was too late.
With the attack on the Soviet Union, the German Air Force became a Service that
mainly supported army operations. In this respect, it was fully in line with Adolf
Hitler’s view who, as Lieutenant General Alfred Jodl noted in his diary, had declared
already before the war, on 27 January 1938: „For Germany, the Army is of criti-
cal importance, with the other branches of the Wehrmacht playing a supplementary,
helping role only“. Getting weaker and weaker, the German Air Force was not able
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to fight a strategic air war in a theater of war as geographically large as the Soviet
Union, with medium-range bomber aircraft that were scarcely suited for this pur-
pose.

51
Weisung Nr. 13, in: Ibid., p. 54.
52
Cited in Boog, Die deutsche Luftwaffenführung (see Note 38), p. 130