Paris

by Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart

THE AIR WEAPON

In the Great War aircraft filled but an auxiliary rôle to the established arms, and their action against the moral objective was merely sporadic. The blow planned against Berlin, which might have revealed beyond question the decisive influence of the new arm, was still-born because of Germany’s haste to conclude an armistice. Those who depreciate the value of the air attack point to the comparatively small damage wrought by any particular attack in the Great War, arguing also that the influx of recruits after some of them showed that such “frightfulness” brought its own recoil in a stiffening of the national “upper lip.”

The best answer to this short-sighted deduction is to present a few facts. Between the 31st of May, 1915, and the 20th May, 1918, the German air-raids over the London area were carried out with an aggregate force of 13 Zeppelins and 128 aeroplanes, dropping in all less than 300 tons of bombs. The total result was 224 fires, 174 buildings completely destroyed, and 619 seriously damaged, a damage estimated in money at something over £2,000,000. This was achieved for the most part in face of strong air and ground defences, and in a war where the total British air force was never markedly inferior in size to its enemy, indeed generally the reverse.

Let us for a moment take a modern comparison, simply to point the moral. France has 990 aeroplanes in the home country, Great Britain 312—and this is a notable increase on the situation two years ago. Even allowing an ample margin of aircraft to hold the British air fleet in check, it would be easily possible for a greater weight of bombs to be dropped on London in one day than in the whole of the Great War, and to repeat the dose at frequent and brief intervals.

A damage spread over three years is a flimsy basis on which to estimate the moral and material results of such a blow concentrated on a single day, delivered with an accuracy and destructive effect unrealizable by the primitive instruments of 1915–1918. Moreover, what is an air fleet of a thousand compared with future possibilities, as civil aviation develops?

Witnesses of the earlier air attacks before our defence was organized, will not be disposed to underestimate the panic and disturbance that would result from a concentrated blow dealt by a superior air fleet. Who that saw it will ever forget the nightly sight of the population of a great industrial and shipping town, such as Hull, streaming out into the fields on the first sound of the alarm signals? Women, children, babies in arms, spending night after night huddled in sodden fields, shivering under a bitter wintry sky—the exposure must have caused far more harm than the few bombs dropped from two or three Zeppelins.

Of the crippling effect on industrial output, let facts speak: “In 1916, hostile aircraft approached the Cleveland district in thirteen different weeks—which reduced the year’s output in that district by 390,000 tons (of pig-iron), or one-sixth of the annual output. In certain armament works it was observed that on the days following raids, skilled men made more mistakes in precision work than usual, the quality of the work done was inferior, while air raids made a constant output impossible.”

Those pundits who prate about the “armed forces” objective appear to forget that an army without munitions is a somewhat useless instrument.

Imagine for a moment that, of two centralized industrial nations at war, one possesses a superior air force, the other a superior army. Provided that the blow be sufficiently swift and powerful, there is no reason why within a few hours, or at most days from the commencement of hostilities, the nerve system of the country inferior in air power should not be paralysed.

A modern state is such a complex and interdependent fabric that it offers a target highly sensitive to a sudden and overwhelming blow from the air. We all know how great an upset in the daily life of the country is caused at the outset of a railway strike even. Business is disorganized by the delay of the mails and the tardy arrival of the staff, the shops are at a standstill without fresh supplies, the people feel lost without newspapers—rumours multiply, and the signs of panic and demoralization make their appearance. Perhaps an even more striking parallel may be found in the disruption of the whole life of Japan in the recent earthquake. An air attack of the intensity that is now possible would be likely to excel even this stroke in its disorganizing and demoralizing effect. Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham, and half a dozen other great centres simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed. Would not the general will to resist vanish, and what use would be the still determined fractions of the nation, without organization and central direction?

Victory in air war will lie with whichever side first gains the moral objective. If one side is so foolish as to waste time—more the supreme factor than ever before—in searching for the armed forces of the enemy, which are mobile and capable of concealment, then clearly the static civil centres of its own land will be paralysed first—and the issue will be decided long before the side which trusted in the “armed forces” objective has crossed the enemy’s frontiers.

If, on the other hand, the decisiveness of the moral objective be admitted, is it not the height of absurdity to base the military forces of a nation on infantry, which would—even if unopposed—take weeks to reach Essen or Berlin, for example, when aircraft could reach and destroy both in a matter of hours?