RAIN OF BOMBS
Milan's wonderful cathedral is here shown under a rain of dummy bombs dropped by 80 aeroplanes during recent manoeuvres of the Italians. To make the display more impressive and to ascertain the results with more certainty, luminous "bombs" were used and fell in a fiery rain upon the city -- a dire portent of future terrors
The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'The doom of cities', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 96-8. It was Cable's second article in a series on 'Things of tomorrow'. The text doesn't actually connect with the illustrations very well. Cable's main point is given away in the title, that in the next war cities will be ruthlessly destroyed from the air, since 'the murderous slaughter of non-combatants' is the most effective way to force a nation to surrender. While he notes that some experts are sceptical of this (Captain Turner, late of Woolwich Arsenal, Lord Castlerosse, Frederick Handley Page), he argues that 'they are flatly contradicted both by the known facts of the last war and by the preparations which we know have been made in anticipation of the next great struggle'.
Today, and as far as we can see into the future, War first of all means Air War; and Air War spells, literally and actually, the "doom of cities."
IF GAS BOMBS COME
Registered air raid shelters are one of the precautions provided in Berlin against the dangers of air raids. During practice raids on Berlin these shelters are brought into use, and here mothers and children are seen gathered in a bomb and gas proof dug-out while while the officer in charge reads aloud the official instructions to civilians in time of air raids
REALISM IN BERLIN
Rehearsals of air raid precautions in Berlin have been carried out with characteristic German thoroughness and realism. This photograph shows a motor-car which has actually been set on fire to show what disasters might occur in an actual raid
STAGING DESTRUCTION
Another example of such thoroughness is seen in this photograph showing debris piled high in a street in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin as a grim warning of what might happen if a house were struck by a bomb. But Berlin has never been bombed and no thoroughness in mock destruction can reproduce the panic of the people in a real air raid
On the illustrations, the implication is that since Britain's potential enemies are taking civil defence seriously, Britain should too. In fact, British civil defence had only just begun a few months before this article would have been published (in July 1935, when the first ARP Circular was issued to local governments by the Home Office), so it was in its very early stages. Italy and Germany had been holding quite public civil defence exercises for some years, so it's not surprising that they would be held up as exemplars. But it is surprising (or at least it was to me) to then discover that during the Second World War Italy's ARP, in particular, was actually quite primitive compared with Britain's. (See Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds, Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 (London: Continuum, 2011.) The British certainly made up for lost time.
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Mark
I haven't had time to look at this book yet, but I know both editors: Marcus Funck and Roger Chckering, eds., Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars. You probably have known about it for ages, but thought I'd mentionit, just in case.
Also, Chickering's book on Freiburg in World War I, another I need to get to, includes early bombing attacks.
Just thought of these thingns because of this post. Cities were really uniquely vulnerabnle in this era—to air attacks especially, and then food shortages, political and labor unrest, and so on.
Erik Lund
Uniquely vulnerable --or uniquely robust?I'd throw it out there that it wasn't the Luftwaffe that destroyed London, but rather London that destroyed the Luftwaffe.
George Shaner
http://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/
...somewhat off topic but this Flickr stream features quite a lot of interesting publicity and pulp art.
Mark
@Erik: I take your point, which is a worthy provocation, but I wonder how people felt in the beginning, or just before.
Also, consider a city like Berlin in World War I: It wasn't susceptible to direct violence, but note the links among food, social stability, and the very legitimacy of the regime. (See Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning.) And didn't the other revolutions in the wake of World War I have a lot (though certainly not everything) to do with how the cities were faring?
Erik Lund
The Central Powers suffered generalised social unrest in 1918 because of a shortage of food, yes. The problem is that this shortage (leaving the blockade that cut off imports that could have alleviated them) was the result of harvest failures, and those failures were due to lack of inputs, mainly of labour.
So you can argue that cities were "vulnerable" because urbanites didn't produce their own food, but only by going to crazy country. It only works if everyone in a modern society is self-sufficient, and that's pretty much impossible with any modern division of labour. In other words (newsflash!) the people who are talking about the "vulnerability" of cities are mainly anti-modernists.
The strategic critique of urban life doesn't hold. To fight a war, you need factories, and factories cluster in urban areas. This is obvious, and the reason that it is ignored is that these arguments enable pastoral fantasy. They're fundamentally unserious.
Brett Holman
Post authorMark:
I know Chickering's book but not the edited volume, thanks! The German experience of air raids in WWI is something I would like to learn more about some day...
George:
Thanks, I have a link to his blog from my sidebar on the front page -- it's appropriately called ATOMIC-ANNIHILATION!
Erik:
Yes, there was definitely a strong vein of anti-urbanism in the knock-out blow literature -- slums as cesspools of human scum, cozy catastrophes wiping out cities so the survivors can start again in a new Eden. But I don't think it is fair to say that everyone who believed that 'civilisation is vulnerability' (as Kipling wouldn't have said) was 'fundamentally unserious'. Not everyone who diagnosed the city as a problem in modern warfare wanted to do away with it; most did not. And to say 'To fight a war, you need factories' is putting the cart before the horse, surely? The idea was not to fight a war in the first place, because the existence of cities made them so easy to lose (in theory of course). If the knock-out blow theory had been correct, it didn't matter how many factories there were, after a few days or weeks they would stop working.
Also: even if London destroyed the Luftwaffe, what did Hamburg/Dresden/Tokyo/Hiroshima/etc destroy?
Erik Lund
Brett: They were weak cities, and were crushed in the Darwinian struggle of (night) life!
Yeah, I guess the whole "fundamentally unserious" thing was a little over the top. Call it annoyance at density-reducing bylaws in an urban neighbourhood where people can get away with renting out attics at a thousand dollars a month. To me.
That being said, I find these arguments about how easy cities must be to destroy from the air frustrating because they turn into arguments about how it's too hard, and therefore we shouldn't even try. That is, that air war is only useful when fighter bombers blow up tanks. Historians of strategy just might even be able to offer the other social sciences avenues for understanding the robustness (or nonrobustness) of cities.
Brett Holman
Post authorI'm quite happy with not trying, actually, whether it's easy or not!
Erik Lund
True, but in the specific context of 2012, it can be argument that we shouldn't intervene at all in, say, Kossovo, or an argument that we should send in the Marines to blow stuff up in a more intimate way, in either case because "air power doesn't work."
That is, given that a "state party" (love Wikipedia!) with the moral high ground has embarked on a course of coercive action, don't we prefer the use of the most efficient means possible? That, it seems to me, opens the way for historians of air power to reap sweet consultancies.
Er, I mean, contribute to fruitful policy debates.
Brett Holman
Post authorI'm still not sure how you get from destroying cities to international intervention -- I'm pretty sure that it would be counterproductive. Of course the effectiveness of independent airpower in such situations is debatable and debated, but that doesn't really go beyond the intentional destruction of communications and transport infrastructure. It seems to me we can and do distinguish between area bombing and precision bombing.
Anyway, this is an appropriate place to mention Ross Mahoney's upcoming talk at Reading in June: 'Air power and a liberal way in war: the West’s quest to remove battle from war'.
Erik Lund
I'm getting there from assumptions about "seeing like a state." In this case, the argument is that while it seems possible to operate strategically on an enemy by air attack on vital nodes, in fact the state is unable to see those nodes. Sure, making a great big hole in the main downtown expressway ought to prevent the city from getting to work, but the informational assets available to air planners doesn't reveal to them the workyard of the private building contractor right next to where the bomb lands, etc, etc.
So, in practice, attacks on nodes become spasmodic violence against concentrations of people. Targeted strategic bombing is just a euphemism for mass murder; send in those kindly old marines!
Alternatively, and this view is disproven by events but motivates the discussion that we started with, human life in cities is so outrageously vulnerable to nodal attacks that may even be incidental to a little of the odd, bracing aerial massacre that what starts out as a few gas bombs here and there descends into the collapse of civilisation with the attendant death of millions.
I want to locate myself in the virtuous middle. Nodes do exist, that they can be attacked, but that they are robust and subject to merely attritional loss.
My example here is Antwerp, a river port built on (very slightly) high ground surrounded by flood plain. Antwerp has always been closely fortified, against floods as well as enemy armies. However, the increasing range of artillery during the Nineteenth Century rendered the old enceinte indefensible and forced new fortifications out 8 kilometers from the city centre.
This left the fortress builders in the position of building interlocking fortlets on the low flooding ground that forced the development of Antwerp in its location in the first place. Antwerp has restricted routes of access determined by minute changes in average elevation. These high roads in and out of town are, naturally, also important places for flood protection and water supply. So you end up fortifying the exact places where there are pumps, reservoirs, sluices, and perimeter train stations. The forts become the very definition of nodal points because, due to geography, they can't be anything but.
London is a more complicated place. I've argued here, or, more accurately, lazily gestured in the direction of the idea that there is a link between the city's spread out into suburbia, the development of high-density commuter rail, and its perimeter air bases and industrial parks. The nodes here are based on human movements rather than hydraulic control, but the point remains. Neighbourhoods, air bases, and greenfield industrial sites spring up on the rail lines, making the areas around the intermodal train stations more-or-less the perimeter forts of London.
So I'm making an extended analogy between an old-fashioned fortified city and the air power fortress that is London. Cities aren't vulnerable, but that doesn't mean that they're not targets. They're the hardpoints in the strategic terrain that have to be overcome to achieve victory in modern war.
Of course, we humans now have exactly the means to do that, which is a pretty good argument against fighting modern great power wars.
Brett Holman
Post authorOkay, I think I get what you're saying now. I'm still not quite sure I agree. I can see that you could wear down a city that way, but would you want to? The civilian casualties would cost support from people on the ground (assuming that was possible/desirable) and at home. Of course that happens anyway, but at least Warden's five ring strategy tries to minimise that.
Well, I'm not anti-intervention on principle (I was in favour of Libya), but the point is that airpower never does get used against the cities of great powers these days, does it.
Chris Williams
I've jsut finished a book in which _Seeing Like A State_ gets some airtime, and I think that JCS concedes in it that there are some technologies of simplification (such as surnames) which increase the potency of the state. I'd add fingerprints and vehicle registrations - the latter far more susceptible to spoofing than the former of course.
The other, perhaps more important, thing that he proves is that when states try to piss about with complex social / ecological systems, stuff tends to turn out badly. In other words, it's easy to break things.
JDK
One fundamental point that seems (to me) not to get the emphasis it deserves is the concept that a city or state would go from one steady state - when hit by Brett's 'knockout blow' to another steady state (usually of disaster).
In other words, most planning punditry and writing (such as our starting piece) on the results of cities under attack failed to factor in the resilience of the people and systems than that they would develop ways around the effects damage, deaths and injury that were both generally unpredicted and in detail often actually unpredictable.
There's another thread where one can argue that the impact of bombing is actually just a step (one of many) in the decline of the city (or state) due to a state of social or political collapse, from external forces, creating internal failures.
Again, generalising massively, it seems to me that if there was both a will and the initial blow was either not heavy enough or deflected, a city could (and they often did) continue to function remarkably better than pre- 1940s pundits believed could be possible, and further into total destruction under repeated attack than most would expect. However that initial attack could have the effect that the knockout blow adherents expected, if it was 'just right' with weight, effect and if in some socio-political way the defender's will was compromised.
But, as they say, that's not my field.
Does anyone else think the heading image looks rather like a children's book illustration of a storytime snowfall? Pretty.
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Brett Holman
Post authorChris:
James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State? I haven't read it. It's talking about the nation state and its own citizens, isn't it? That is to say, not an enemy state. Does it apply across national boundaries? Perhaps, in the sense that power is being exerted. And 'piss[ing] about with complex social / ecological systems, stuff tends to turn out badly' describes the bomber dream pretty well, come to think of it.
JDK:
Yes, the emphasis was nearly always on the short, sharp shock, the point of inflection where everything was in rapid flux. (A singularity, if you will.) There was a general failure of imagination (or rather too much imagination) in imagining the situation after this, to consider that maybe the situation afterwards might be coped with.
Yes, I'm not convinced that a knock-out blow with conventional bombing was completely impossible. If the Luftwaffe had been as huge as the Rothermere press claimed, and had the range and the airfields to strike London, and had used gas, and had attacked, say, at the end of September 1938 -- well, 150,000 people fled the city without any air raids, given the state the British had worked themselves into who can say what would have happened if it had been on for real. Whether it would have led to a British capitulation is another matter; I suspect that, a battlefield victory might been necessary as well (e.g. armoured offensive against France). Even then, moments of panic, when defeat seems the only option, can pass quite quickly. It was all about those periods of flux, after all.
I agree with this too :)
JDK
There's an interesting thread in the discussion regarding 'was there ever a real chance of a 'real' knockout blow?' (I'm assuming there wasn't a real one - maybe there was, that I don't know?)
The feared Luftwaffe of 1938 you mention was never real, nor did it ever have the capabilities claimed, so it's a hypothesis at even the best. There's a different question of why no-one ever ran any realistic numbers, given aircraft capabilities were not that secret. But clearly most 1930s public (and some government and air force) 'analysis' was more hysteric than actually analytic.
But then the thought also occurred to me that it was argued at the time that the German attacks on Warsaw and Rotterdam in 1939 and 1940 were both examples of 'frightfulness' (TM Great War Allied Powers) and 'proved' the knockout blow that had been feared was real, and shown 'there'. However a read on the actual events rather the encrusting propaganda of the time and since don't offer such a simple or confirmatory reading, I think. But that's history all over.
And likewise predicting the future is a fools game either way up; the best analysis is so often confounded by reality, and the recent posts you've done lately showing the various ARP and mock attack defences are all notably unrealistic, not least their emphasis on gas, which was ironically partly not used, because it was predicted!
Brett Holman
Post authorNot that I know of, unless you count things like the NATO bombardment of Serbia in 1999. I think the closest the WWII era came to a KOB was probably (ironically) Belgrade in 1941, but even then it doesn't seem like bombing would have forced capitulation without a ground offensive. It was a true blitz, perhaps.
Hence my use of the word 'If' :P
Yes, as shattering as the attack on Rotterdam was the casualties were overestimated by a factor of about 50. I've been meaning to write a post about that...
JDK
"Hence my use of the word 'If'."
- Oh, I wasn't criticising your comment, just my continued frustration with the analysis and punditry of the period being so utterly divorced from reality, or even the most basic facts; clearly even people who could* work out that a certain size of aircraft and engine combination would have a maximum range too low to arrive at the knockout blow's target by some hundreds of miles, did not, for instance. There was profound ignorance over the actual capability of most munitions, for instance, which is a (also inexcusable) technical testing failure, but range calculations are fundamental to safe flight by any airman (or woman) of the era.
Regards,
*Or in the case of air force or air ministry staff, should've.
Brett Holman
Post authorFair point. It would be interesting to have a look at the Air Ministry et al.'s actual calculations, if they survive, behind their various estimates of the amount of tons which could be dropped on London. The (lack of) basis for the casualty multipliers is reasonably clear, but the total tonnage would also depend on various assumptions and calculations like the ones you point out. By the time the first Western Air Plans were being drawn up (and so the Air Ministry was starting to think seriously about the reverse problem) in the late 1930s a more realistic appreciation of the situation should have emerged, if not prevailed.
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