The Bomber Will Always Get Through - Basis in Fact

Basis in Fact

Many theorists, especially in Britain, imagined that a future war would be won entirely by the destruction of the enemy's military and industrial capability from the air. The Italian general Giulio Douhet, author of The Command of the Air, was a seminal theorist of this school of thought. H. G. Wells' pre-World War I novel The War in the Air concluded that aerial warfare could never be 'won' in such a manner as bombing, but in 1936 he depicted a war starting suddenly with devastating air attacks on "Everytown" in the film Things to Come. Likewise, Olaf Stapledon, in his 1930 novel Last and First Men depicts a very brief but devastating war in which fleets of bombers deliver huge payloads of poison gas to the cities of Europe, leaving most of the continent uninhabited.

At the time bombers had a slight performance advantage over fighters due to having multiple engines, so a successful interception would require careful planning in order to get fighters into a suitable defensive position in front of the bombers. Before World War II and the invention of radar, detection systems were visual or auditory, which gave only a few minutes' warning. Against World War I designs these systems were marginally useful, but against modern aircraft flying at twice their speed or more, they did not provide enough time to arrange interception missions. This balance of force meant that bombs would be falling before the fighters were in position and there was little that could be done about it. For Britain, the answer was to concentrate on bomber production, primarily as a deterrent force.

Before war began in 1939, such theories resulted in predictions of hundreds of thousands of casualties from bombing. The military expert Basil Liddell Hart speculated that year, for example, 250,000 deaths and injuries could occur across Britain in the first week. The most influential among the few who disagreed with such views was Hugh Dowding, who led RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. Others included Americans Major Claire Chennault, who argued against the so-called "Bomber Mafia" at the Air Corps Tactical School, and Lieutenant Benjamin S. Kelsey, Fighter Projects Officer for the United States Army Air Corps.