Sir Arthur Harris’s memoirs, published in 1947, betrayed a boyish fascination with the power of vast infernos, referring to such terrible phenomena as ‘fire tornadoes’ and ‘fire typhoon[s]’. He quoted a secret German document written in the aftermath of the July 1943 RAF bombing of Hamburg, describing it as a raid that ‘went “beyond all human imagination”’.1 Harris added that ‘it must have been even more cataclysmic than the bursting of the two atomic bombs over Japanese cities’. He also quoted the German report of the firestorm that roared through the city, ‘against which every human resistance was quite useless’.
This for him seemed less a matter for moral doubt and anxiety than about coolly analysing a mesmerizing man-made apocalypse. He was also at pains to point out that the creation of fire typhoons had been the aim of German bombers over Britain; they had succeeded in Coventry and failed in London, although that had seemed to be their goal: the Blitz, after all, was code-named Operation Loge after the fire-demon in Das Rheingold.
Harris also explained that there had been misconceptions on all sides at the start of the war about the style of bombing raids that would have the most impact, and that the British were hampered by erroneous thinking. ‘High explosive bombs were invariably too small, and of the wrong kind,’ Harris wrote. ‘The standard 250lb general purpose bomb, as it was called, was a ridiculous missile.’ And the sorts of bombs that were not ‘ridiculous’ were ‘hardly considered’. These included blast bombs, which he claimed had the dual advantage of bringing down buildings while causing few casualties, as long as the population below was securely in shelters.
Then there had been the German tactic of spreading a bombing raid on a British city throughout the hours of the night. This was unlikely to create a conflagration, because in the gaps between the bombardments the hard-worked fire services could usually tame the flames, but the idea was to induce exhaustion among the emergency services and general civilian population alike. The difficulty for any side prosecuting this approach, mused Harris, was that defences began to be firmed up as the conflict wore on, and for the British bombers in those early stages of the war, ever more effective German anti-aircraft searchlights and guns meant a quite horrifying number of bombers were shot out of the sky, their industrial targets relatively unharmed. The principle of concentration became more important; the idea that a swift, massive raid with incendiary bombs might instead start hundreds of individual fires that could not all be put out. The ideal was to create an all-consuming fire.
Air Chief Marshal Harris had long contemplated the possibilities of such a tactic. In the aftermath of the First World War in 1919, when he was a squadron leader in Iraq, the British believed that the territory could be controlled by intimidation from the air rather than having troops on the ground.2 Young Squadron Leader Harris, high in those Arabian skies, looking down on simple dwellings, mused on the effect of bombs: an entire village could be reduced to ashes within forty-five minutes. And short of shooting rifles into the air, there would be next to nothing that the people below could do about it.
The fact was that fire as a tool of warfare was something that appealed as much to unknowably old instincts as well as intelligence. By reducing everything to ash, fire cleansed and made new room for the victor. The Assyrians in the ninth century BC had developed combustible weapons; sulphuric fires in copper globes. There was the coming of so-called ‘Greek fire’ under the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Pogonatus – possibly a blend of naphtha, sulphur and quicklime, again producing intense flame – that could be launched at enemy ships. Here was a weapon forged by secret science. Only the Byzantines knew the exact formula, and only they knew the technique by which it could be mixed on ships in cauldrons, and then distilled into tubes or siphons prior to being discharged at the enemy, an operation that apparently created both an ear-splitting thunderclap and copious smoke. This Greek fire was a forerunner of phosphorous bombs, the burning substance that would consume both wood and flesh. It had been used in the Siege of Constantinople in 717–18, and in the centuries to come new admixtures would be launched from trebuchets.
The coming of gunpowder and the regimenting of increasingly professional, highly trained armies across Europe did nothing to quench the instinct to burn. Sometimes as a deprivation strategy it was vividly successful; in 1812, as Napoleon marched his forces deeper into Russia, those Russians pulling back before him set the land aflame, ensuring that with every mile the Grande Armée travelled the spectacle of desolation and hunger greeting his men would increase. It was said that significant parts of Moscow also went up in towering flames against the bleak winter skies; and greeted with this spectacle of death, Napoleon was forced to turn back. But those fires along the way had ruined supplies of both food and arms; and suddenly the prospect of retreat was now sharply flavoured with the possibility of mass slaughter.
Just a year later Napoleon was in Dresden, facing an alliance on the plains and in the forests of Bohemia of Russians, Prussians and other forces drawn from across central Europe. Dresden had seen fire and bombardment before, and simply because the city was beautiful, it did not mean that it or its people were fragile. Broadly, Dresdeners supported Napoleon, but as the Russian and Bohemian armies carefully advanced to the city’s perimeter, there was no guarantee that he could hold the town. ‘What artist has ever troubled himself with the political events of the day anyway?’ wrote E. T. A. Hoffmann in 1813 as his windows shook from the distant explosions of battle. ‘But a dark and unhappy age has seized men with its iron fist, and the pain squeezes from them sounds that were previously alien to them.’3
And while it was true that many European cities and towns had, throughout the centuries, found themselves caught in the middle of complex conflicts, which brought with them artillery and cannon fire, the firepower remained on the ground. The advent of air power at the beginning of the twentieth century immediately changed all that as Italian and British pilots, high above African plains, insouciantly dropped bombs on rebellious colonial subjects.
The ethical debates concerning the use of bombing had been conducted since the early 1920s, as air forces across the world began to organize more effectively. There was a fine distinction drawn between ‘terror bombing’ – the indiscriminate dropping of explosives on residential areas and civilians – and ‘morale bombing’, in which factories and industrial plants were targeted, with civilians becoming collateral damage.4 Italian general Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air in 1921; his thesis was among the first in print to suggest that a sufficiently mighty attack from the air would extinguish the fighting courage of the civilian population to the extent that their rulers would have no choice but to capitulate.5 However, a great many others were instantly repelled by this proposed new incarnation of total war. In Britain, there were draft rules discussed in Whitehall committees that ‘embraced the premise that indiscriminate area bombardment was unlawful’.6 Yet the idea that a sufficiently shocking bombardment would instantaneously shatter the enemy’s will to fight on remained too tempting and also in a curious way seemed utilitarian: there might perhaps be sacrifice of the lives of non-combatants but surely better that than to repeat the charnel-house slaughter of millions in conflicts that ground on for years? In 1925 the military historian and former soldier Basil Liddell Hart referred to this as subduing the enemy ‘through the spirit’.7
There were others, though, who took a more clear-sighted and icier view of the nature of this future war. In 1927 Lord Tiverton declared that ‘the girl filling a shell at a factory is just as much a part of the machinery of war as the soldier who fires it. She is much more vulnerable and will certainly be attacked. It is impossible to say,’ he continued, ‘that such an attack would be unjustified.’ Therefore, he concluded, ‘an attack will be made upon the civilian population’.8 This complemented the more famous Stanley Baldwin statement ‘the bomber will always get through’, and spoke of the same fears. In any new war with Germany, this would certainly be the aim of the enemy: the aerial bombardment not only of factories but of homes too, for if the workers were to witness their families and their houses destroyed, then they would be in no kind of state to return to the production lines needed for fast precision work on war materiel. The RAF and the War Office were also thinking back to the Great War, and the Great German Fire Plan for the Luftwaffe to drop as many incendiaries upon London as they could.
Even in the pre-nuclear era in the years before the Second World War, the popular imagination had been haunted by apocalyptic visions of destruction raining from the sky: authors as diverse as H. G. Wells and ‘Sapper’, the creator of the rabidly gung-ho Bulldog Drummond spy adventures, had depicted airships pouring poison down upon major cities. Wells’s novel The War in the Air, published in 1908, envisaged fiendish German flying craft called Drachenflieger (dragonflies), under the command of a Kaiser-like ruler attacking the east coast of America with chemical weapons.
The sickly premonitions of mass culture were matched with nervy speculation from senior government and establishment figures. As First World War Royal Flying Corps bomber and author Frank Morison observed in 1937, serious bombing onslaughts used as routine instruments of war would result in ‘a gap in the continuity of human culture’ that would be ‘beyond all mending’.9 There were those who sought to dampen increasingly bellicose rhetoric. In 1938, Neville Chamberlain announced that ‘the deliberate bombing of civilians was contrary to international law’.10 That law had already been thoroughly broken by Hitler and Mussolini from 1936 onwards as they began their infamous intercession in the Spanish Civil War. The hope that they might somehow be persuaded not to do it again seemed vain.
Yet even the Nazis seemed keen that the notorious 1937 bombing raid on the northern Basque town of Guernica fitted within a quasi-legalistic international framework. The Luftwaffe’s avowed intent, the Nazis contended, was to damage rebel armaments and manufacturing plants, not to massacre the civilians of a town that had had little involvement in the conflict. Hundreds of civilians were killed, and three-quarters of the town’s buildings were destroyed or made uninhabitable. Global political reaction was one of revulsion, yet the attack was studied closely too.
And it is striking that, no matter how sophisticated the developing technology throughout the ensuing war – from target finders to the strips of metal-foiled paper known as ‘Window’ dropped from aircraft to blind enemy radar, to more comprehensive ‘electronic blankets’ to do the same – the principles somehow remained ancient. This was not simply about attacks from the air, but about a very much more atavistic impulse. With Guernica had come a philosophy that put the attackers up among the ancient gods, like Zeus firing thunderbolts from the heavens and those below unable to defend themselves. The only truly rational response was fatalism. When exploring the international legality of such raids, the Germans, like others, were most interested in attacks that would destroy morale; if the citizens could see the unearthly power of these choreographed raids, then, it was reasoned, capitulation would follow swiftly.
Yet rationality seemed elusive on the part of both the aggressors and the victims. The Luftwaffe worked on perfecting the waves of destruction, and on the bombs that would shatter most effectively: in September 1939, following their incursion into Poland, the Germans launched repeated air raids on Warsaw. On the morning of 25 September, the largest and most carefully coordinated of these unleashed hundreds of tons of high explosives and incendiaries, starting vast fires on either side of the Vistula, filling the air with the smoke and embers from beautiful civic buildings and churches and blotting out the sun. In the fiery twilight of those crackling streets, it was expected that any armed resistance would give way immediately. It did not. Even though the city was captured two days later through the efforts of the army on the ground, it was clear that the bombing, while shocking the capital’s citizens, had not cowed them.
When a weapon is available, the impulse is always to use it. The Nazi bombing of Rotterdam in 1940 – intended as an adjunct to the shock of ground invasion – pursued the leitmotif of unquenchable flame after the Nazi push into the Netherlands had been met with a level of resistance that caused some surprise. The plan was that troops and tanks would enter Rotterdam with flamethrowers following a precision bombing raid.11 In fact, the raid was the exact opposite of precise.
Rotterdam’s centre had a large number of medieval wooden-framed buildings, close-built streets and alleys patterned with the echoes of European history. The Luftwaffe swooped down from the skies, flying low to unload their explosives and incendiaries with apparent indiscrimination. Building after building yielded to the spread of the fire. Here was Nazism in its fresh flowering of nihilism, a willingness not just to destroy hundreds upon hundreds of non-active civilians but also to erase the beauty around them. This was the flourishing of a power that said: we can now wipe out civilizations. And in this rare case, it worked: when the Luftwaffe next threatened to return to reduce the medieval wonders of Utrecht to seething ash, the government of the Netherlands felt compelled to surrender. Their desire was not merely to protect Dutch citizens but to preserve the country’s history and culture, irreplaceable landmarks of memory and belonging.
The Luftwaffe had also achieved an unintended side effect, an unexpected quirk of physics that reinforced the idea that, with enough research, they could visit a man-made apocalypse on any city of their choosing. The conflagrations spawned in the Rotterdam raid were too fierce and too many to be fought by the fire services on the ground, and as they spread, feeding their own intensity, so the nature of the air that nourished them changed as well. A column of intense, radiant heat was rising above the city, and in the remaining stumps of streets below, this was producing superheated vacuums in which breathing was impossible and that were causing untethered objects to rise from the ground. This was the sort of fire tornado that Harris and Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal were to become so mesmerized by.
The phenomenon had been seen before. In 1871 parts of Wisconsin had been suffering prairie fires in prolonged dry spells, the orange sun hanging sickly in the smoke-laden sky. A gang of railway construction workers clearing brush from deep in the woods accidentally started another fire that, owing to some unique atmospheric conditions, including an insistent westerly wind, swiftly acquired an extraordinary intensity. Cold air was sucked into an ever-growing column of blinding heat, and the flames swept through illimitable acres of dry woodland.
The process was reported to have been amazingly, terrifyingly fast; other railway workers in the path of the sheet of flame roaring towards them were said simply to have combusted on the spot. According to one witness, the phenomenon actually ‘sounded like freight trains’. The fire spread out further, and the flames approached the town of Peshtigo. It was faced with a ‘wall of flame a mile high and five miles wide’, now burning at some 2,000 degrees centigrade – hot enough to turn sand into glass. Wooden houses and churches were engulfed. Many years later, this would be described as ‘nature’s nuclear explosion’.12
The Peshtigo Paradigm became the subject of American scientific research; what was this phenomenon known as a ‘fire whirl’, so superheated that anyone standing in it might find themselves drawn helplessly into the air, higher and higher, revolving in a tornado while being burned alive? An estimated 1,200 people died in the inferno; the numbers could not be precise owing to the often unidentifiable nature of the remains. The fire, which had greedily consumed 1.2 million acres, eventually exhausted itself and countless survivors were left with hideous burn injuries and what would now be termed post-traumatic stress disorder.
There was another terrifying outbreak in 1881, in logging country in Michigan; one witness later said: ‘The onrushing flames would leap high into the air then descend to the ground like a bouncing ball, burn everything before them, then rise for another leap.’13 This was a ‘hurricane carrying a sheet of flame’, and once more it had found richly wooded country to spread across. There was a mushroom of superheated air and flame that rose far into the sky. Onlookers described it as ‘the end of the world’.14 And in its aftermath, there was again a terrible scientific fascination about the effect that it had had on animals and humans. Livestock had simply been cooked; sheep and cows were charred. Humans too had been baked alive; many were found without clothes, shrivelled. Of the survivors, many suffered hideous legacies, their feet and hands burned off. Others had had their eyes burned out or their faces disfigured.
These rural catastrophes were followed in 1923 by fire typhoons visited upon two Japanese cities, sparked by the Great Kanto Earthquake. People at Yokohama docks were suddenly startled and terrified by a noise like unearthly thunder.15 Then those on the piers were sent flying as the ground beneath them shifted. Next came the tsunami, a monstrous wall of black water rolling across warehouses and homes, humans reduced to tiny drowning specks in the maelstrom. And afterwards came the fires, both to Yokohama and to Tokyo, seventeen miles to the north, which had also been hit by the tremor. The earthquake sparked flames, and in residential districts composed wholly of wooden houses, fires started leaping across streets, devouring all with speed. The nightmare intensity of the flames prompted religious responses. One onlooker said: ‘If this were not hell, where would hell be?’16 Elsewhere, a Jesuit priest was hypnotized by the horror of the spectacle: ‘Each new gust of wind gave new impulse to the fury of the conflagration,’ he said.17
But here was also a new and more terrible element: population density. Although the American firestorms had killed many, the destruction was spread over a huge and sparsely populated area. In crowded Tokyo, the pulsing heat and the approach of flames higher than any skyscraper caused mass urban panic. There were those who sought to flee but found themselves trapped in the suffocating crush of a crowd that was pushing against itself in all directions. The instinct to escape resulted in human gridlock.
Closer to the Sumida river, and with the air around them becoming steadily hotter, the panicking crowds made for the water. Yet for many, there was no sanctuary in the swirling currents, only exhaustion, and huge numbers drowned. The crowds still rushing from the surrounding streets soon started to overload the bridges crossing the river; some buckled and collapsed, taking with them many more lives.
This was a modern city, yet it and its inhabitants were helpless before a conflagration of such extraordinary force. Roads melted into viscous treacle; railway lines warped. All gas and electricity supplies were completely disabled. Telephone wires and poles along with electric cables simply disintegrated and vanished in the flames. There was nothing any fire-fighting team could do; 130 separate fires were conjoining with a rapidity that made them elemental.
In other parts of the city, with the air now filled with floating glowing embers and the deep roar of the rising flames, many sought escape by making for the city’s open spaces, filling its squares and parks. What happened in one park was, again, biblical in its appalling scale. The sheets of flame were coalescing and they now produced what was termed locally as the ‘dragon twist’ – the fire tornado, or firestorm. Once more that terrifying inversion of gravity ensued, trees and bodies plucked from the ground into the maw of the superheated inferno. They would simply have melted.
The fire created hurricane-force winds, the effect of which was akin to a blast furnace. Clothes were shredded, torn off by the air itself; internal organs roasted. In some cases, depending on where the victim had been in relation to the fire, corpses might look little more than sunburnt. Conversely, in the worst instances, parts of them had been liquefied.
A western trader called Otis Poole observed: ‘Over everything had settled a thick white dust, and through the yellow fog of dust, still in the air, a copper-coloured sun shone upon this silent havoc in sickly reality.’18 The death toll was prodigious, in the region of 156,000 lives, though once again it was difficult to be exact when so often all that remained were fragments of jewellery and headless naked husks.
Since the advent of flight, military strategists had brooded on the age-old daydream of weapons so terrible that they would have the power to stop wars in an instant and make victory certain. Winston Churchill was contemplating after the First World War the idea of a weapon that could be created in a laboratory, and that would somehow contain hitherto unimagined destructive forces. He envisaged something ‘the size of an orange’19 which would be inconceivably more powerful, and generate a much greater blast, than any contemporaneous technology.
In the years after the slaughter in the trenches – the first conflict to be captured in detail on celluloid, thus bringing to the wider civilian population images of a black-and-white world of squalor and death – there was an understandable fear of the same kind of conflict recurring. The dream was of decisive air power that, simply by threatening innumerable lives, would paradoxically serve to save many, many others. It could in one sense be cleaner.
Yet this is not how Britain began its air war with the Germans. As Hew Strachan observed: ‘The RAF did not enter the war with a well-developed plan to conduct a strategic bombing offensive, designed to kill as many German civilians as possible.’20 Even if it had wanted to, the means were not there: flight distances were limited, navigational technology was still rudimentary. Its aircraft were not able to penetrate deep into Germany. In addition, there was a genuine anxiety that the targets should indeed be of the ‘precision’ variety – the great industrial works that were powering the Nazi war machine. Partly this was to do with the international rulings and guidelines that had been debated throughout the previous decade (as well as an important plea on the eve of conflict from the then neutral US and its President Franklin D. Roosevelt that civilian areas outside combat theatres should never be bombed) and also to do with a strategic sense that strikes against important infrastructure would keep the fighting contained; for there was the world after the war to consider as well.
The dissolution of a mutual code of aerial warfare was gradual. The Nazi attack on Rotterdam was a clear signal of intent. After the fall of France to the Germans in June 1940, when British forces were forced to retreat, the only way of taking the fight to the enemy was in the air. There was a British raid in August 1940 against Berlin, essentially at the limit of the RAF’s range at that time, the targets including Berlin airport near the centre. Ninety-five bombers flew in the raid, and though they caused some casualties and disruption, both were comparatively light. None the less, the audacity inspired rage in Hitler. With the German expectation that the RAF’s losses during that summer’s Battle of Britain would soon render it effectively inoperable, Hitler authorized attacks on London. This, though, was not intended at the start as terror bombing; the targets – docklands, factories, power stations – were intentionally industrial rather than residential.
All the same, from the night of 7 September 1940 right the way through until the following May, for residents near the docklands of the East End and south London, life was turned inside out: bombs that sounded like the footsteps of giant ogres, sheets of flame hundreds of feet high bringing choking clouds of toxic smoke laced with burning sugar and cinnamon, the result of warehouse blazes. Families sat in almost absurdly inadequate shelters, and then emerged, giddy from lack of sleep, to see nothing where their homes had once been. For others, the sight of sliced-open houses, exposing fireplaces and bathrooms, was near hallucinatory. The author Virginia Woolf walked out of her house in Bloomsbury during an air raid, her arms held up to the sky as if drawing the bombers towards her.
Although it had become clear to the Germans by the autumn of 1940 that they had not vanquished the RAF, and that Hitler was not prepared to risk the invasion of England, the Luftwaffe continued with its attacks on British cities. The bombers over London – even if they had been aiming for factories – flew deeper into residential suburban districts. The effect of the unremitting nightly assault on the people below seemed a curious mix of acceptance and mordant humour. The Nazis were hoping for revolution; the closest they got was an organized group of East End residents marching to the West End and demanding entrance to the cellars of the luxurious Savoy Hotel.
Nor would the science of firestorms obtain here: among the precision targets marked out for the Luftwaffe were the lanes of the City, London’s financial and economic heart. Although close-built, the district had already seen a previous fiery catastrophe some centuries earlier in 1666; there was very little in the way of timber construction to be found there now. And while the narrow residential streets lying close to St Paul’s Cathedral between Aldersgate and Moorgate were so effectively bombed that they became nothing but dust and stumps of stone, the fires sparked by the magnesium incendiaries would not take hold.
None the less, by 1941 Chief of the Air Staff Sir Charles Portal acknowledged that the approach of the RAF towards German targets was to change. The idea of precision bombing mutated into area bombing.21 Real precision was still not possible, and it was absurd to pretend that it was; with Germany effectively blacked out, and bombers facing not merely the hazards of flak and enemy fighter aircraft but also the blankness of cloud cover, the idea that it was possible to aim, from thousands of feet up, at the centre of a ball-bearing factory that lay somewhere in a great pool of darkness was untenable. The targets were now large city centres. Generally, the industry lay on the peripheries of these urban areas. But the intention now was to create wider social havoc. The US president was informed of the intensified strategy; there were no objections from America, and none from Stalin’s Soviet Union either.
Thus, in March 1942, 234 Wellington and Stirling bombers took off from bases in Norfolk, including RAF Marham, with the aim of bringing fire to a medieval city on the Baltic Sea. Lübeck, once the cornerstone of the Hanseatic League, linking a range of ports in northern Europe, with a picturesque warren of historic lanes and marketplaces, had some submarine construction works outside the centre; but as the new Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris was to later admit, it was hardly the most crucial or urgent of targets.22 Lübeck was, however, a laboratory in which a new theory would be tested.
There were three waves of bombers under a bright frosty moon, swooping over the silver river and canals. The first wave carried the ‘Blockbuster’ bombs, whose purpose was to smash down upon roofs and open them up, ready to receive the following incendiaries. Countless fires burst into life. Timber crackled, while the rich brown local brickwork baked and glowed. On that crisp dry night, the flames in the old city conjoined, gorging even on the great churches. The bells were melted. The death toll was not (by later standards) hugely high: some 300 mortalities. But in the space of several hours, about 15,000 people were made homeless. It had, from the point of view of Bomber Command, been a fantastic success; now they could bring roaring infernos to city after city.
Lübeck’s most celebrated cultural figure was the author Thomas Mann, whose autobiographical novel Buddenbrooks – a sensational international success – was set largely in the city. He and his family had left Hitler’s Germany many years beforehand. At the time of the raid, Mann was in America, making radio broadcasts for the BBC propaganda unit intended to be heard by his countrymen. (The Nazis forbade any citizen to listen to unauthorized broadcasts on pain of death, yet many still did.)
‘Did Germany believe that it would never have to pay for the misdeeds which its lead in barbarism enabled it to commit?’ Mann declared. ‘It has hardly begun to pay – over the Channel and in Russia … Hitler is boasting that his Reich is ready for ten, even twenty years of war,’ he continued. ‘I assume that you Germans have your own ideas about that – for example, that after a fraction of this time, no stone will stand on top of another in Germany.’23
As fire takes hold, so too does the anger of war; by means of direct revenge, the Nazis launched the Baedeker Raids against Britain, so named because the targets were beautiful cities that had received three stars in the famous German guidebook. Like Lübeck, these targets had very little if anything by way of industrial or strategic significance: the aim was to cause anguish by obliterating old treasures. Exeter, Bath, York and Canterbury were among the historic targets; death tolls were in the hundreds and architectural gems – centuries-old guildhalls, quaint eighteenth-century shopping streets, the monastery houses adjoining Canterbury Cathedral – were irreplaceably obliterated.
This was bombing as deliberate sacrilege. It was not just the idea of sacred sites such as Canterbury facing wanton demolition; even secular architectural glories carried with them a uniqueness that spoke to the national soul. Along with science came psychology: the pain and the national humiliation of having such exquisite streets permanently mutilated would be intense.
And yet, here again, the Germans were aware that such raids would hardly form any kind of knockout blow; there was no possibility they would force Churchill and the Air Ministry to change their own tactics. Perhaps the bombed populations of Essen and Cologne, Magdeburg and Bremen might have derived some moments of satisfaction after learning that the ancient Roman structures in Bath had been endangered and destabilized by the Luftwaffe; yet that satisfaction would not have lasted long after once more gazing at the ruins created by the RAF.
But this was an instance of the shadow line of rationality being crossed; the Baedeker Raids had no purpose other than that of raw emotion. This in turn brought a further moral dimension to the philosophy of total war: the notion of blood-thumping vengeance enacted upon civilians. The technology to enable the slaking of such unthinking fury was by this stage improving daily. From the British point of view, the Gee navigation system – involving frequent timed radio pulses and on-board oscilloscopes – was bringing a much wider variety of potential targets, detectable by technology if not by the naked eye, into view, and making longer-range missions more practicable.
Some, however, were becoming ever more anxious about the moral issues raised by unleashing such power. This was a war increasingly fought by physicists as well as soldiers; scientists in laboratories were working as tirelessly as all those in the services to devise routes to victory. Some among those working for Bomber Command were tormented by dilemmas posed by their very own breakthroughs.