Day 248: The Bombing War

The bombing of Bulgaria recreated in microcosm the many issues that defined the wider bombing offensives during the Second World War. It was a classic example of what has come to be called ‘strategic bombing’. The definition of strategic bombing is neither neat nor precise. The term itself originated in the First World War when Allied officers sought to describe the nature of long-range air operations carried out against distant targets behind the enemy front line. These were operations organized independently of the ground campaign, even though they were intended to weaken the enemy and make success on the ground more likely. The term ‘strategic’ (or sometimes ‘strategical’) was used by British and American airmen to distinguish the strategy of attacking and wearing down the enemy home front and economy from the strategy of directly assaulting the enemy’s armed forces.

The term was also coined in order to separate independent bombing operations from bombing in direct support of the army or navy. This differentiation has its own problems, since direct support of surface forces also involves the use of bombing planes and the elaboration of target systems at or near the front whose destruction would weaken enemy resistance. In Germany and France between the wars ‘strategic’ air war meant using bombers to attack military and economic targets several hundred kilometres from the fighting front, if they directly supported the enemy’s land campaign. German and French military chiefs regarded long-range attacks against distant urban targets, with no direct bearing on the fighting on the ground, as a poor use of strategic resources. The German bombing of Warsaw, Belgrade, Rotterdam and numerous Soviet cities fits this narrower definition of strategic bombing. Over the course of the Second World War the distinction between the more limited conception of strategic air war and the conduct of long-range, independent campaigns became increasingly blurred; distant operations against enemy military, economic or general urban targets were carried out by bomber forces whose role was interchangeable with their direct support of ground operations. The aircraft of the United States Army Air Forces in Italy, for example, bombed the monastery of Monte Cassino in February 1944 in order to break the German front line, but also bombed Rome, Florence and the distant cities of northern Italy to provoke political crisis, weaken Axis economic potential and disrupt military communications. The German bombing of British targets during the summer and autumn of 1940 was designed to further the plan to invade southern Britain in September, and was thus strategic in the narrower, German sense of the term. But with the shift to the Blitz bombing from September 1940 to June 1941, the campaign took on a more genuinely ‘strategic’ character, since its purpose was to weaken British willingness and capacity to wage war and to do so without the assistance of German ground forces. For the unfortunate populations in the way of the bombing, in Italy or in Britain or elsewhere, there was never much point in trying to work out whether they had been bombed strategically or not, for the destructive effects on the ground were to all intents and purposes the same: high levels of death and serious injury, the widespread destruction of the urban landscape, the reduction of essential services and the arbitrary loss of cultural treasure. Being bombed as part of a ground campaign could, as in the case of the French port of Le Havre in September 1944 or the German city of Aachen in September and October the same year, produce an outcome considerably worse than an attack regarded as strategically independent.

In The Bombing War no sharp dividing line is drawn between these different forms of strategic air warfare, but the principal focus of the book is on bombing campaigns or operations that can be regarded as independent of immediate surface operations either on land or at sea. Such operations were distinct from the tactical assault by bombers and fighter-bombers on fleeting battlefield targets, local troop concentrations, communications, oil stores, repair depots, or merchant shipping, all of which belong more properly to the account of battlefield support aviation. This definition makes it possible to include as ‘strategic’ those operations that were designed to speed up the advance of ground forces but were carried out independently, and often at a considerable distance from the immediate battleground, such as those in Italy or the Soviet Union, or the aerial assault on Malta. However, the heart of any history of the bombing war is to be found in the major independent bombing campaigns carried out to inflict heavy damage on the enemy home front and if possible to provoke a political collapse. In all the cases where large-scale strategic campaigns were conducted – Germany against Britain in 1940–41, Britain and the United States against Germany and German-occupied Europe in 1940–45, Britain and the United States against Italian territory – there was an implicit understanding that bombing alone might unhinge the enemy war effort, demoralize the population and perhaps provoke the politicians to surrender before the need to undertake dangerous, large-scale and potentially costly amphibious operations. These political expectations from bombing are an essential element in the history of the bombing war.

The political imperatives are exemplified by the brief aerial assault on Bulgaria. The idea of what is now called a ‘political dividend’ is a dimension of the bombing war that has generally been relegated to second place behind the more strictly military analysis of what bombing did or did not do to the military capability and war economy of the enemy state. Yet it will be found that there are many examples between 1939 and 1945 of bombing campaigns or operations conducted not simply for their expected military outcome, but because they fulfilled one, or a number, of political objectives. The early bombing of Germany by the Royal Air Force in 1940 and 1941 was partly designed, for all its military ineffectiveness, to bring war back to the German people and to create a possible social and political crisis on the home front. It was also undertaken to impress the occupied states of Europe that Britain was serious about continuing the war, and to demonstrate to American opinion that democratic resistance was still alive and well. For the RAF, bombing was seen as the principal way in which the service could show its independence of the army and navy and carve out for itself a distinctive strategic niche. For the British public, during the difficult year that followed defeat in the Battle of France, bombing was one of the few visible things that could be done to the enemy. ‘Our wonderful R.A.F. is giving the Ruhr a terrific bombing,’ wrote one Midlands housewife in her diary. ‘But one thinks also of the homes from where these men come and what it means to their families.’

The political element of the bombing war was partly dictated by the direct involvement of politicians in decision-making about bombing. The bombing of Bulgaria was Churchill’s idea and he remained the driving force behind the argument that air raids would provide a quick and relatively cheap way of forcing the country to change sides. In December 1943, when the Mediterranean commanders dragged their feet over the operations because of poor weather, an irritated Churchill scribbled at the foot of the telegram, ‘I am sorry the weather is so adverse. The political moment may be fleeting.’ Three months later, while the first Bulgarian peace feelers were being put out, Churchill wrote ‘Bomb with high intensity now’, underlining the final word three times. The campaign in the Balkans also showed how casually politicians could decide on operations whose effectiveness they were scarcely in a position to judge from a strategic or operational point of view. The temptation to reach for air power when other means of exerting direct violent pressure were absent was hard to resist. Bombing had the virtues of being flexible, less expensive than other military options, and enjoying a high public visibility, rather like the gunboat in nineteenth-century diplomacy. Political intervention in bombing campaigns was a common feature during the war, culminating in the decision eventually taken to drop atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This (almost) final act in the bombing war has generated a continuing debate about the balance between political and military considerations, but it could equally be applied to other wartime contexts. Evaluating the effects of the bombing of Bulgaria and other Balkan states, it was observed that bombing possessed the common singular virtue of ‘demonstrating to their peoples that the war is being brought home to them by the United Nations’. In this sense the instrumental use of air power, recently and unambiguously expressed in the strategy of ‘Shock and Awe’, first articulated as a strategic aim at the United States National Defense University in the 1990s and applied spectacularly to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in 2003, has its roots firmly in the pattern of ‘political’ bombing in the Second World War.

~~The Bombing War : Europe 1939–1945 -by- Richard Overy