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the water supply and the sewerage system. It was generally recognised, he continued, „that
bombing raids on the civilian population are uneconomical and ill-advised“.
4
Most fateful for the German cities, however, was the development of air war strategy in
Great Britain. In the First World War German Zeppelins and the so-called „Giant Bombers“
had attacked London and the first German 100 kilo bomb hit the Chelsea Hospital. The fear
and terror of bombardment amongst the population, the “air scare” became a sort of trauma
for certain British government ministers. In 1917 the government set up a commission,
5
under General Jan Smuts, to look at general questions of air warfare. As a result the British
government established an independent air force, the future Royal Air Force, although it was
not actually deployed in the First World War. 6
The idea of bombing German towns had, however, already been mooted in principle in
1918. A memo from the Empire General Staff of January 1918 recommended, „The policy
intended to be followed is to attack the important German towns systematically... It is in-
tended to concentrate on one town for successive days and then to pass to several other towns
returning to the first town until the target is thoroughly destroyed, or at any rate until the
morale of workmen is so shaken that output is seriously interfered with“. Maybe this sort
7
of strategic bombing was less of an alien concept to the British than to other nations because
of their traditional use of naval blockades. These had always been designed to cripple
8
the entire enemy nation, not just its armed forces. On top of all this came the completely
unsubstantiated notion that, to paraphrase Lord Weir‘s famous statement, nations of differ-
ent racial origin from that of Britain like the German were „susceptible to bloodiness“ and
their morale would therefore be the first to break. In 1936 Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin
9
encapsulated the British strategy for air warfare in the sentence: „The bomber will always
get through“. 10
The Air Force Marshal, Lord Hugh Trenchard, drafted the Royal Air Force War Manual,
in 1928. Trenchard stuck to the specifically British attitude towards strategic bombing. He
firmly believed, like the French Marshal Foch, that air raids „owing to its crushing moral ef-
fect on a Nation, may impress the public opinion to a point of disarming the Government and
thus becoming decisive“ Theoretical descriptions of the likely consequences of air raids
11
on a civilian population did much to persuade the government to grant the Royal Air Force

4 Henry H. Arnold/Ira C. Eaker, Winged Warfare. New York 1941, XIII.
5 See Raymond H. Fredette, The First Battle of Britain 1917-1918 and the Birth of the Royal Air Force. Lon-
don 1966, 233.
6 See H.A. Jones, The War in the Air. Oxford 1937, Vol. Appendices, Appendix II, 8-14.
7 Ibid., Appendix IV, 26.
8 See Horst Boog, Der angloamerikanische strategische Luftkrieg über Europa und die deutsche Luftver-
teidigung, in: Horst Boog/Werner Rahn/Reinhard Stumpf/Bernd Wegener (Eds.), Der Globale Krieg. Die
Ausweitung zum Weltkrieg und der Wechsel der Initiative 1941-1943 (Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite
Weltkrieg, Bd. 6). Ed. By the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Stuttgart, 1990, 429.
9 Fredette, The First Battle, 225.
10 See Irving B. Holley Jr., Die Entwicklung der Abwehrbewaffnung für die Bomber der US-Heeresstreitkräfte
in den Jahren 1918 bis 1941. Eine Studie über Produktionserfolge trotz Mängeln in der Doktrin, in: Boog
(Ed.), Luftkriegführung im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 166.
11 See Jones, the War in the air, Vol. appendices, appendix Vii, 33.