Page 424 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

424 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

request for a strong bomber fleet. Its first task would be to attack the opponent‘s air force,
thereby preventing a counter-attack against England. According to the War Manual the main
aim of air raids was not to bring down enemy aircraft, but to destroy willpower and national
morale. It said, amongst other things: „A nation is defeated once the people or the govern-
ment no longer have the will to pursue its war aims“. 12
The Manual also quite rightly stressed that many political-economic-industrial systems
fulfilled both civilian and military functions. Workers often lived close to their factories, so
that air raids on centres of this sort could shatter civilian morale and at the same time de-
stroy enemy resources. While other nations tried, albeit in vain, to make a clear distinction
between civilian and military, the British had deliberately chosen to see them as two sides of
the same coin. And in any case since modern hi-tech warfare was so closely interwoven with
all aspects of society, any attempt to separate them was unlikely to succeed. The British had
regarded demoralisation as the actual, the ultimate aim, and the „ulterior purpose“ of bom-
bardment. „Before the war the Royal Air Force was geared towards conducting a strategic
bombing offensive, and this was the nub of Trenchard‘s doctrine“. Nor did this doctrine
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change when, from the mid-1930s onwards, bombers ceased to be regarded merely as pow-
erful deterrents and defensive weapons. Britain felt it simply had no choice but to establish
a balance between air attack and air defence, by setting up ground observation and fighter
command posts and by building the necessary fighter planes.
What remained open to question, however - quite apart from any moral scruples which
some of those involved certainly did have - was whether the population of a totalitarian
regime like Nazi Germany, who had originally been very positive about it and supported it,
would then be either willing or able to influence their political leaders. Wasn‘t it actually
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more likely that bombardment would reinforce Nazi die-hard slogans and make the popula-
tion more defiant, along the lines of „now you‘ve really got it coming!“ The Joint Planning
Sub-Committee including its member Group Captain Arthur Harris created in 1936 a paper
on „The Appreciation of the Situation in the Event of War against Germany“. Here one could
read: „Moreover, a military dictatorship is likely to be less susceptible to popular outcry than
a democratic one Government“. 15
The French air force, which had been designed for tactical support of ground troops and
was, in any case, very antiquated, had no chance to get involved in strategic air warfare after
the country capitulated in spring 1940. As for the Soviet Union, let‘s be quite clear here that
unlike Britain and the USA, it had to wage war on its own territory and therefore had other
priorities for air war, which basically boiled down to supporting its ground troops. Apart from
the important task of supplying partisan units with provisions, the Soviet air force success-
fully impeded the flow of supplies to German units from the air and also used aerial block-

12 Charles Webster/Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945. London 1961,
Vol. IV, Appendix 2, 73.
13 Horst Boog, Der angloamerikanische strategische Luftkrieg, 433.
14 See H.A. Probert, Die Auswirkungen des strategischen Luftkrieges auf die deutsche Moral 1940-1945. Bri-
tische Erwartungen und deutsche Reaktionen, in: Klaus-Jürgen Müller/David Dilks (Eds.), Großbritannien
und der deutsche Widerstand 1933-1945. Paderborn [etc] 1995, 197-216.
15 Webster/Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive, Vol. IV, Appendix 4, 89.