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HITLER TRIES TO PREVENT CIVILIAN SLAUGHTER
Spaight noted that the Germans had to react to this innovation in warfare, which greatly disturbed them. In a section entitled The Germans Become Apprehensive Spaight wrote:
“Perhaps Hitler’s famous intuition gave him an inkling of the ultimate significance of what Britain was beginning to do in 1935-36. In May of the former year he expressed, his personal apprehension on the subject of long-range bombing to Mr. Edward Price Bell, the well-known press correspondent. ‘War has been speeded up too much,’ he said, ‘and made too overwhelmingly destructive for our geographical limitations. Within an hour — in some instances within forty minutes of the outbreak of hostilities — swift bombing machines would wreak ruin upon European capitals.’ There was nothing profound in that remark, but it was significant when made by a man in whose brain there was already being formed a scheme for the domination of Europe. He was afraid of the air. He showed that he was, again, when in 1935 and in 1936 he put forward proposals for the prohibition of bombing outside battle-zones. Again, there was nothing new in the idea of such prohibition. It was simply another instance of the survival of the military code of thought. It reflected the view, put forward in Germany in the last war, that the proper role of the air arm is that of long-range artillery.” (p.27)
Spaight records that Hitler attempted in 1935-36 to restrict bombing from civilian centres and wanted this to be enacted in international agreement. Spaight comments:
“I can not subscribe to the view that Hitler brought it forward in 1935 and 1936 with his tongue in his cheek; not in the least because he was incapable of doing so, but simply because it was unquestionably in his interest to have such a restriction accepted. He was scared of the possible effect of a bombing offensive upon Germany’s war effort and the morale of the German population. He would infinitely have preferred to fight out the war in another way, a way that was not our way but was his way. He did not want our kind of war.” (p.29)
Spaight welcomed Britain’s decision to initiate the bombing of civilian centres referring to it as “Our Great Decision.” He emphasised that Bomber Command went to war on the 11 May 1940. It had only been playing with war up until that point. That was a watershed point in the conflict with Germany because it moved the World War onto a new battlefield, one of England’s choosing, that would seal the destruction of Germany through a long attritional destruction of its society, in the way Britain liked to fight its wars.
Spaight is clear that the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam were entirely a different kind of warfare than the saturation bombing Britain was intent on initiating on Germany and attempting to provoke Hitler to carry out on London:
“One thing is certain, and it is a thing which should be made clear, for it is commonly misunderstood: the bombing of Warsaw or of Rotterdam was not in parallel with the bombing of London… The attack upon London was not Blitzkrieg. Blitzkrieg is the combination of swift mechanised onslaughts in the air and on the ground. It is a technique of attack which leaves the assailant in possession of the objective. Now, air attack alone could never have left London in the hands of the enemy. If Hitler had gone on bombing London from that time to this he would never have conquered London.
“When Warsaw and Rotterdam were bombed, German armies were at their gates. The air bombardment was an operation of the tactical offensive. It was therefore, for the Germans, ‘according to Cocker’, ‘Cocker’ here being a standard of military expediency alone… They are, au fond, stupid people on the whole. They showed their stupidity when they kept on harping, once the raids on London had begun, on the retaliatory nature of the attacks on the city. Again and again the German official reports emphasised the reprisal element in the action of the Luftwaffe. They kept screaming, in effect: We are hitting you because you hit us first. If you stop bombing us, we’ll stop bombing you. That, too, was the recurrent note in Hitler’s periodical denunciations of our air offensive. He added to his diatribes a good deal of sob-stuff about war on women and children…” (pp.30-1)
Spaight quotes a number of Hitler’s speeches to prove his point and then comments:
“I can read them in one way only, and that is that, whatever Hitler wanted or did not want, he most assuredly did not want the mutual bombing to go on. He had not wanted it ever to begin. He wanted it, having begun, to be called off. That, I am firmly convinced, was the aim behind all his frantic bellowings and all his blather about attacks on the civil population. He knew that, in the end, our air offensive, if it did not win the war for us, would certainly prevent Germany from winning it. That that and nothing else was his motive is shown by other happenings also. One was the unanimity with which the chorus of Press and radio in Germany plugged the theme-song that long-distance bombing is useless and that the proper place for the air arm is the vicinity of the battle-zone.” (pp.33-4)
According to Spaight the “Teutonic Mind” was locked into traditional military practice and aristocratic notions of honour. Luckily “Prussianism” had not been destroyed by Britain when it won its Great War on Germany. The Prussian notions of warfare, originating with Frederick the Great, had been passed down to Hitler with the General Staff he inherited, disabling him as a ruthless warrior in the mode of Britain, which always develops the most efficient, destructive and ruthless forms of waging war.
Fritz Hesse, advisor on British affairs at Hitler’s Headquarters, confirmed this in his book Hitler and the English:
“In its original conception, aerial warfare against Great Britain was not intended to spread terror through the land by mass-bombing, to force England to give way. Hitler and the General Staff of the air force set no store by mass-bombings and the systematic destruction of cities… The original plan was that the air force should carry out a sort of blockade by destroying all the main centres of transport and communication… But it was considered wasteful and useless to drop bombs on the dwellings of the civilian population and no provision was made for such bombing in the plan… The destruction of London was neither intended nor desired… when it became known that the City, and not the docks, was burning the report was handed to Hitler, he was furious. He was, in fact, so furious over the destruction of the City, this ‘Holy Ground’ of the English, that he first thought of drastic measures to punish those responsible… The destruction of London, which had never been imagined, played a disastrous part in the imaginations of the uninformed… Whatever our propaganda may have attempted, the terrorisation of English cities was not the strategic objective of the Luftwaffe. In fact, I gathered from a conversation with experts that the means at the disposal of the Luftwaffe in those days would not have been adequate for such a purpose.” (pp.116-7)
The bombing of England and the killing of its civilians lay entirely outside the imagination of the Germans and had to be put there by Britain:
“Breaking staying power and morale by obliterating cities breathed of pure Trenchard Doctrine. The German airborne forces were not geared for such a strategy; they were a tactical force designed to support ground troops, blaze the trail for motorised armed forces, and maintain the flexibility of the ground war. They never had armed and armoured strategic bombers that could cover the entire area of the British island. Only because they took off from airfields near the English Channel were they within reach of the opposite shore, with cover from fighter planes. From the territory of the German Reich Hitler could have reached hardly a city.” (Jorg Freidrich, The Fire The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945, pp. 58-9)
It was only the Declaration of a World War on Germany by Britain and the British unwillingness/inability to fight a conventional military contest with the German Army and then the unprecedented extent of the victory of 1940 that put Hitler in the unimagined position of having to contemplate the bombing of England. And it was then the entirely unilateral and provocative decision by Churchill to bomb German cities, when very little impact of military importance could be made on them, which generated Hitler’s response.
It was the RAF command who wanted a Blitz on London and Hitler who would rather not have obliged. But Hitler grew angrier and angrier after RAF bombs fell on Germany and responded with all sorts of threats of ausradieren against English towns. It was all just propaganda for Hitler, who thought he could affect the British psychologically through propaganda. When Goering pleaded with him for reinforcements from the airforce stationed in Poland Hitler refused because he needed it for the Russian campaign. As Hesse noted: “Goering, so Hitler said, did not even now, understand that he wanted to keep the British down but not to lay them flat.” (p.118)
Why? Hesse explains:
“While Hitler frittered away whatever small chances there might have been of coming to terms with England, he also threw away the military chances of forcing a peace upon her. He was dominated by two assumptions: that we must not defeat her and that we must save up all we had for the Russian campaign.
“British propaganda twisted the fact that Hitler failed to invade England into proof of England’s invincibility. The truth, however, was as I can testify, that Hitler never went ahead with his plan for the invasion but regarded it as dubious from a technical point of view and politically undesirable… But in my opinion the reasons which decided Hitler against the invasion were political rather than military.
“For the reader to understand this, I must repeat that Hitler, according to my own observations, was inspired by a strange love-hatred of England. He admired the British Empire and repeatedly pronounced it the greatest wonder-work ever wrought by God.” (pp.112-13)
And, of course, Churchill knew the thrust of Hitler’s intentions through the enigma machine.