A Summer Bright and Terrible (4 page)

Again—for the last time—the Kaiser balked. But
English aircraft by now had retaliated against Karlsruhe, and even though that
single raid had been more ineffective than the airship attempts to hit the
docks of London, the future was clear. The enemy would build bigger airplanes
and more destructive bombs, and the only defence was to rain destruction on
them so dramatically that they would not dare to challenge warfare in this new
realm. The Kaiser conceded, and unrestricted aerial bombing of London began.

And, of course, it escalated. Soon the airships
were wandering all over the southeast of England, and the German army responded
by developing giant Gotha bombers that could carry a heavier bomb-load than the
zeppelins could. By 1917, these airplanes were dropping hundreds of pounds of
bombs each, travelling at heights and
speeds too high and fast to be reached by the Royal Flying Corps
fighters or antiaircraft cannon. In June, a force of twenty Gothas attacked
London in daylight, dropping two tons of bombs directly onto the Liverpool
Street railway station and one no-pound bomb directly onto a nursery school,
killing sixteen babies and severely injuring a score more. On February 16,
1918, a squadron formed specifically for the purpose of bombing England dropped
a specially designed one-ton bomb on Chelsea. It hit nothing significant and
did little damage. But one month before, the same commander had attacked London
with then-standard 660-pound bombs. Aiming for the Admiralty, he had hit
instead the Odham Printing Works, which had been designated an air-raid shelter
because of its heavy construction, designed to hold the gigantic printing
presses, beneath which five hundred Londoners huddled in the basement. The bomb
shattered the foundations of the building, the printing presses collapsed, and
the upper floors came crashing down into the basement and onto the masses
sheltering there. Thirty-eight people died and a hundred others were injured.
Had the bomber carried the one-ton bomb that night, all of them would have been
killed.

The future looked promising.

Three

The First World War ended when the German
U-boats were defeated, America came into the war, and the British tanks overran
the trenches and crushed the German machine-gun nests. The airplane had not
been a decisive weapon; the air raids on Britain had killed fewer than two
thousand people during the entire course of the war, in a country that killed seven
thousand in traffic accidents every single year. But those air raids had shown
the future, and it was terrifying.

In 1921 an Italian general, Giulio Douhet,
wrote in
Command of the Air
that future wars would not be fought by
armies on the ground, but by fleets of bombers sailing over their enemy’s defences.
They would be able to drop unimaginable terror on the home population,
destroying the people’s will to resist. Within two days, he wrote, thousands of
civilians would flee the cities. Nothing could stop the bombers, and no
population could withstand them.

His argument was heard loud and clear in both
England and America. England’s Major General J. F. “Boney” Fuller wrote in 1923
that a fleet of five hundred bombers could cause two hundred thousand casualties
“and throw the whole city into panic within half an hour.” There would be “complete
industrial paralysis,” a rebellion
against any government that could not provide protection—and none
could—and the war would be lost within a couple of days. Lord Balfour, heading
the Committee on Imperial Defence, estimated that an enemy could drop a daily
seventy-five tons day after day, and that London could not endure this. The Air
Ministry revealed the results of a statistical analysis showing that England’s
traditional enemy, France, could produce seven thousand deaths and an
additional twelve thousand severe casualties within the first week.

In America, General Billy Mitchell wrote that
the only possible defence was offense: “The hostile nation’s power to make wars
must be destroyed. . . . [This included] factories, food producers, farms, and
homes, the places where people live and carry on their daily lives.”

In other words, terror bombing.

The message was too horrible for Americans to
hear, and so they tuned him out and retreated behind their oceans. If those
dreadful Europeans wanted to bomb each other, let them and be damned!

Those dreadful Europeans, it seemed, had little
choice. Aside from building bigger fleets of bombers as a deterrent, what could
they do? Well, there was always the League of Nations and mutual disarmament,
of course.

But there were problems with the League, aside
from the fact that the United States had turned its back on it. In 1923, the
League proposed a disarmament conference, which was finally convened in 1932,
to little avail. Germany opened the proceedings with the indisputable point
that the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the Great War, was manifestly
unfair; they wanted to be treated equally with the other great nations of the
world. The British were willing to do so, but the French would not accept
Germany as an equal partner unless Britain would guarantee to join France if
Germany again initiated a war, and this Britain would not do. It had had enough
of foreign commitments. The Japanese brought up the issue of racial equality,
which the Europeans thought was in quite poor taste and
with this regard the currents of the conference were
turned awry, and lost the name of action.

Its defeat was inevitable. Of all the nations, Britain
was the most vulnerable to aerial attack and therefore should have argued most
strenuously for disarmament—which would mean primarily the abolition of the
airplane as a weapon of war. But how could they, when they were making such
effective use of it?

They had agreed with all the other nations in
the League on the proposal to banish poison gas, but that was an easy one.
People were terrified of gas, so the ban was popular among the populace. What’s
more, it had never been an effective military weapon, so the ban didn’t bother
the people in charge. The airplane, though, was a different matter: It
definitely had its uses, particularly to the British, for whom the subcontinent
of India and the vast deserts of Arabia constituted a tremendous burden—the
white man’s burden, as Kipling so famously put it. There were enormous profits
to be garnered there, but there was also considerable expense in the form of
standing armies to keep the peace along the Northwest Frontier of India and
wherever the Bedouin tribes gathered in Arabia. The natives were understandably
restless, feeling that the white man was a burden too heavy to be borne, and so
the British were forced to keep armies permanently garrisoned, clothed, fed,
and housed throughout their recalcitrant empire.

But no longer were these armed masses
necessary, not since the British had discovered that a few squadrons of bombers
could take the place of these large, expensive armies. If a tribe along the
Northwest Frontier or far up the Nile began attacking its neighbours or the
local missionaries, a couple of bombers would fly up from Bombay or Cairo and,
within a few hours, would destroy the offending village from the air. The
marauding tribesmen could do nothing but prance around helplessly on their horses
and fire ineffective bullets into the air while their homes, wives, and
children were blown to bits. If the
very next day another rebellion were to take place hundreds of miles
away, the same squadron could deal with it. A minuscule number of men and machines
could keep the king’s peace throughout the Mid- and Far East.

So when the League of Nations was presented
with a resolution prohibiting the use of military airplanes to bomb civilians,
in the manner that poison gas had been prohibited, the Colonial Secretary and
the Chancellor of the Exchequer of England hesitated to embrace it. The British
army battalions that had earlier policed the Empire had been largely disbanded
in an effort to satisfy the budget that had been ruined during the war, and it
would be prohibitively expensive to bring them back again under arms and ship
them out. No, the bombing of civilians was here to stay; it was simple
economics.

What the British began to whisper in the back
rooms of the League was something a bit subtler. They suggested the civilized
nations should ban airpower against each other, but should not interfere in
each nation’s internal affairs. To put it bluntly, which they tried desperately
not to do, it was a regrettable but stern necessity to keep the peace among benighted
natives by bombing them, though it would be morally reprehensible to use those
same airplanes to bomb the people of Berlin or London.

The ban on poison gas was simple and
straightforward; the proposed British ban on airplanes was cluttered with subordinate
clauses, winks, and tongues firmly in cheeks. It did not have the clear moral
suasion of the ban on gas.

There was yet another problem with the proposed
ban. Despite having one of the world’s smallest armies, Britain had become the
most powerful nation in the world, because of its navy. If any country should
go to war against this island nation, Britain’s first course of action was to
use the navy to blockade the offender. The effect of the blockade—to starve the
country into submission—was essentially a weapon against the civilian
population. How then could the British argue for the abolition of the airplane
on the grounds that it
attacked
civilians, when their own basic strategy was just as guilty? They could not
press for an international agreement against air forces unless they were
prepared to give up their navy’s most effective weapon. And this they were not
about to do.

There were still more problems. Airliners and
bombers alike are designed for the best possible speed, range, and carrying capacities,
which meant that civilian airplanes could be modified overnight to carry bombs
instead of passengers, which in turn meant that the only way to ban military
airplanes would be to ban all airplanes. The Secretary of the Air Ministry
pointed out that even small biplanes intended for pleasure flying could be
modified overnight to carry 350 pounds of bombs over distances of hundreds of
miles (and we have recently seen how terrible a weapon even unarmed jet
airliners can be).

The arguments were irrefutable. It was
impossible to ban airplane design, airplane production, and even the use of
airplanes to bomb civilians. The only possible recourse was to pursue the exact
opposite: for each nation to build for itself an air force capable of deterring
attack by imposing always the threat of instant and massive retaliation by
fleets of bombers.

The idea of bombing civilian populations from
the air goes back an incredible three hundred years, to the year 1650, when an
Italian priest, Francisco Tana, published a book describing an aerial ship. Lift
was to be provided by four evacuated copper globes, each twenty-five feet in
diameter. Because we live at the bottom of an ocean of air, he reasoned,
propulsion was to be by oars and sails. But he never tried to build it, because
“God would surely never allow such a machine to be successful since it would
create many disturbances in the civil and political governments of mankind.
Where is the man that can fail to see that no city would be proof against
surprise when the ship could at any time be steered over its squares or
even over courtyards of houses and brought
to earth for the landing of its crews? Iron weights could be hurled to wreck
ships at sea, or they could be set on fire by fireballs and bombs, nor ships
alone but houses, fortresses and cities could thus be destroyed with the
certainty that the airship could come to no harm, as the missiles could be
hurled from a great height.”

Needless to say, the idea languished for a
while. The first military use of the air was for observation rather than
bombing. The strategy sounds rather passive, but if the concept had been
followed faithfully, Napoleon would have ruled the world.

It was balloons rather than airplanes, but the
concept was the same. Balloon flight had been pioneered in France in the
mid-1700s, and so the Committee of Public Safety, set up in Paris after the
French Revolution, decided to use observation balloons to help France’s armies.
In 1793 they built the world s first military observation balloon. Filled with
hydrogen and tethered to the ground, the balloon carried a hanging basket for
two people, one to handle the balloon and the other to act as observer and to
communicate with the ground by dropping messages in sandbags. At its extreme
height, the observer equipped with a telescope could see nearly twenty miles;
in other words, he could see the whole of that era’s battlefields. It was so
brilliant an idea that it led to the establishment of the world’s first air
force, the Compagnie d’Aeronautiers, in 1794.

That year, during his conflict with Austria,
Napoleon became the first military commander to use the advantages of the air
for reconnaissance. The balloon successfully spied on Dutch and Austrian troops
from high above its own armies, providing detailed reports of the location and
composition of enemy troops and directing artillery fire against them. The
Austrians protested that this was a violation of the rules of war, but Napoleon
laughed off the charge. They then attempted to shoot it down, but the balloon
floated too high for their bullets.

Its success led to the building of three more
balloons, which
were used
during all of Napoleon s battles for the next two years. Then, in 1797, he
brought the aeronautiers with him to Egypt, and when the British successfully
shot them down, he lost faith, disbanded the group, and abandoned the concept.
He did so to his everlasting regret, for in 1815, the balloons could have
reversed the final decision at Waterloo.