Revisiting the Battle of Britain, the Blitz--and British Bankruptcy

In considering the air war fought between Britain and Germany in 1940-1941 (the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz which followed it) it seems to me worth remembering that when the Luftwaffe began its campaign most observers shared two assumptions about the consequences of aerial warfare.

1. Societies will crack quickly under aerial bombardment--the shock to morale quickly producing widespread disruption far out of proportion to the physical damage the bombers actually inflict, with Giulio Douhet arguing in The Command of the Air that a force of even twenty planes could "break up the whole social structure of the enemy in less than a week, no matter what his army and navy may do." (It is worth recalling that Douhet assumed a use of chemical weapons, but I am not sure that this was essential, the more in as the purpose of the gas in his 1921 book seemed to be to disrupt emergency response, rather than produce really mass-scale deaths; and that, given the very low numbers and primitive aviation technology of the day a larger number of more advanced aircraft solely using "conventional" bombs, such as were available by 1940, could not have compensated for the lack of chemical weaponry.) This confidence in the ability of a small number of aircraft to produce so much havoc was based on the second assumption, namely that

2. "The bomber will always get through." Stanley Baldwin's phrase is famous, the larger remarks of which it is a part less so. Simply put, the idea was that protecting a country against air attack meant covering far too much airspace, including at night and in bad weather, for any conceivable air force to be confident of intercepting an appreciable number of the bombers (given that this was a matter of pilots in aircraft with top speeds in the low hundreds of miles per hour, relying on their eyes to spot the planes and machine guns with which to shoot them down). The result was that "there is no power on earth that can protect . . . any large town within reach of an aerodrome" from "being bombed," and thus the only "defence is in offence"--in hitting back harder with one's own bombers so that the enemy state fell apart first--in a situation analogous to how people came to think about war waged with ballistic missiles (with the gas weapons bombers were expected to use in the interwar period analogous to the nuclear ones they expected ballistic missiles to deliver).

Of course, both assumptions were quickly shown up, by both the greater-than-expected resilience of societies in the face of air attack, and the advent and exploitation of radar which made it possible to detect incoming aircraft and efficiently and speedily direct interceptors at them. This made the technical inadequacies that might not have mattered so much otherwise critical--namely, that air force bombers could not reliably find their targets and strike them accurately with the technology of 1932, or even 1939, while even if they were able to do so it would take a good deal more planes to do the job, preferably bigger planes equipped and organized to fight their way through a far more formidable defense than anyone imagined at the start of the '30s. Ultimately it was to take a shift from a Bomber Command of hundreds of planes to one of thousands, with Blenheims replaced by Lancasters, led by Pathfinder squadrons equipped with radio navigation aids (Gee, Oboe) and even newfangled airborne radar (H2S), covered by radar jamming, chaff and long-range escort fighters, and utilizing their Mark XIV bombsights to become really effective in the face of even a long-attrited Luftwaffe--the products of what from the standpoint of the late '30s were a mobilization of resources and drive toward technical advance scarcely thinkable outside a world war.

In the interim the advantage shifted to the defensive--and joined with other advantages to make it the stronger form still. (In an aerial campaign where bombers and escorts are up against interceptors and ground-based anti-aircraft units it stands to reason that, all other things being equal, the bombers and escorts will get the worst of it. There is the reality that pilots in damaged aircraft over friendly territory are more likely to find a safe place to land and save their aircraft rather than lose their aircraft as they try reaching their more distant base. Pilots shot down over friendly territory, if surviving the loss of their aircraft, are far more likely to return to service, in contrast with downed pilots over enemy territory likely to get captured. And so forth.)

Indeed, Germany's failure to defeat Britain with its bombers is only one half of the story, with the other half Britain's failure to defeat Germany with its own Bomber Command, which says a lot about the reality of the situation--the more in when we consider the correlation of forces. In spite of the hype (so saturating the media even before the war that in the famous short story--published six months before the conflict's outbreak--the cover of the magazine Walter Mitty picks up asks "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?"), the Luftwaffe lacked a significant quantitative or qualitative edge over Britain's air force.

The result is that the German leadership's poor strategy in the course of the Battle of Britain and the subsequent Blitz, and the German government's refusal to prioritize aircraft production, flawed as they were, were hardly decisive--even a far better performance here likely falling well short of what it would have taken to win air superiority over southern England. The fact seems to me underscored by the reality that so many of the counterfactuals about the invasion scenario rely less on a more astute use of the Luftwaffe than on the employment of German special forces to tip the scale (as with the notion of an airborne attack on the airfields of southern England).

Still, Germany did not have to win the air war (let alone successfully execute what the air war was supposed to pave the way for, an invasion of Britain) to win the war. The reality was that as the bombs fell German submarines (and planes, and surface vessels of various types) attacked British shipping (while in the Mediterranean Italy entered the war and conflict loomed with Japan in the Far East), such that German action and British efforts to fight it off succeeded in draining Britain's limited resources at a rate that was soon to spell exhaustion. As Clive Ponting reminds his readers, in the summer of 1940 Britain's leaders knew the country would be bankrupt before the end of 1941 and perhaps much sooner, after which point, in the absence of relief, the country would have had to take whatever terms it could get (likely to have been less generous when the dark day came in March 1941 than what they would have been in the summer of 1940). And ultimately it was the readiness of the U.S. to keep Britain from going under, at the price of truly unprecedented financial and material support (over the course of the entire war Lend-Lease eventually approaching the equivalent of a year's worth of Britain's pre-war GDP).

The fact is well known but relatively little talked about--I suppose because it is hardly flattering to the nationalistic myth about Britain standing alone against Hitler; because it underlines how leaders whose wisdom historians prefer to praise rather than denigrate failed to redress industrial decline and imperial overstretch that left Britain far weaker than it might have been in an exceedingly dangerous period; and because, quite frankly, that other ending to the story looks so inglorious compared to the image of a Britain that, had it gone down, would have gone down fighting, and the Churchill well aware of this so inconsistent with the Churchill of legend who promised to fight on the beaches and the landing grounds and in the fields and the streets and in the hills, for "we shall never surrender."

It is far more comforting to take for granted that the aid would have come through, while where counterfactuals and alternate history are concerned it is particularly appealing--writers of even the counterfactual, after all, more than is generally recognized, preferring what makes besides a pleasing story an interesting and dramatically satisfying one. It is simply the case that more people are interested in minute reconstructions of battles than in political economy, while the turning of history on the battlefield appeals to the dramatic sense in a way that running out of foreign exchange does not.1 For British writers, certainly, it does not help that the key decision would have been made not in London but in Washington, Britain's fate in another country's hands precisely because of how weak its leaders had allowed the country to become--while there is the problem of explaining how the alternative would have occurred. They would have to locate it in the vicissitudes of American politics in which they are that much less likely to have an interest--and which would not comport with the romantic view many take of the common values and "special relationship" of the "English-speaking peoples." Meanwhile my experience of World War II-themed counterfactual and alternate history has Americans not much more likely to speculate about such a turn, apparently more willing to imagine an Axis victory as a result of defeat than of the country's not trying at all, save perhaps as a sermon on the foolishness of isolationism (as with Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which does indeed turn on electoral politics taking a different course with Charles Lindbergh becoming President). Even then they tend to imagine America's fate in the situation instead of what other peoples might be going through (rather than, for example, envisioning a Britain under the Nazi jackboot, a much less plausible scenario of the U.S. itself being occupied), while not being much more inclined to pay attention to things like foreign exchange. I suppose there is a symmetry in that--but also a reminder of how national blinders break up the bigger picture of a world event, and how much our understanding suffers when we neglect "boring" stuff like gold reserves in favor of heroics during the Darkest Hour.

1. Reading the essay collection If the Allies Had Fallen: Sixty Alternate Scenarios of World War II, which contains contributions from such prominent historians of the subject as David Glantz, Richard Overy and Gerhard Weinberg, does not include among its sixty counterfactuals a single one considering Britain's financial exhaustion, or more broadly, the U.S. staying out of the war.