Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [31]
Unconvinced that Britain could defend its cities and towns against German air assaults, additionally constrained by the limited range of his airplanes based in England and France, Trenchard nevertheless endorsed ‘forward action’ against German airfields and storage facilities wherever these could be reached. ‘The aeroplane is not a defence against the aeroplane,’ he wrote in a widely circulated memo in September 1916. ‘But the opinion of those most competent to judge is that the aeroplane, as a weapon of attack, cannot be too highly estimated.’ In the wake of the Gotha attacks on London the following year, Trenchard unleashed two flights of de Havilland bombers against the Burbach iron foundry, outside Saarbrucken. Unmolested by German opposition, the de Havillands hit several buildings and railway lines, encouraging Trenchard to repeat the performance several more times that fall, and then with renewed intensity once the weather had improved in the spring and summer of 1918. William Weir of the Air Board wrote to Trenchard that September: ‘I would very much like if you could start up a really big fire in one of the German towns.’ Nor would Weir ‘mind a few accidents due to inaccuracy’, since ‘the German is susceptible to bloodiness’. ‘I do not think you need be anxious about our degree of accuracy when bombing stations in the middle of towns,’ replied Trenchard. ‘The accuracy is not great at present, and all the pilots drop their eggs well into the middle of the town generally.’ Under British bombs, a German civilian wrote, ‘one feels as if one were no longer a human being. One air-raid after another. In my opinion, this is no longer war, but murder.’25
Murder it may have been, but the air war had developed a relentless logic by the time of the Armistice in November. As they had done when the Germans used gas, the British had claimed to be outraged when the Zeppelins and Gothas rained bombs on English cities. Then they had then done their utmost, as before, to retaliate in kind. The justification for bombing was similar, too. Someone else, someone more barbaric, had done it first. There was no choice but to attack the enemy’s cities, since technology did not permit of any defense against bombers. (Trenchard likened it to trying to stop submarines from penetrating a naval blockade.) The soldiers on the ground deserved the protection that air strikes could provide. And, of course, the hardiest justification of all: holding civilians hostage in war would inevitably increase the pressure on their government to sue for peace. Bombing cities, like using gas, would end wars more quickly and thus save lives. It was humane to bomb noncombatants.
The ‘Trenchard Doctrine’ was the name given to the policy of using bombers as offensive weapons following the First World War. But Trenchard was not its only advocate, nor its most emphatic; ‘if I had the casting vote,’ he said ruefully in 1925, ‘I would say, “Abolish the air.” ’ Others, outside and inside Britain, embraced air power. The Italian air commander Giulio Douhet published, in 1921, The Command of the Air, in which he claimed that air superiority was the only way to win the wars of the future. Targeting ordinary citizens was essential: ‘Mercifully,’ Douhet wrote, ‘the decision will be quick in this kind of war, since the decisive blows will be directed at civilians . . . These future wars may yet prove to be more humane than wars in the past in spite of all, because they may in the long run shed less blood.’ The American Billy Mitchell met Trenchard in France during the war, and oversaw an attack by Allied