The case against area bombing

On 11 February 1960 Patrick Blackett gave the Sir Henry Tizard memorial lecture to the newly founded Institute for Strategic Studies (a body Blackett hoped might shed some much-needed scientific light upon crucial human matters such as the nuclear threat). This lecture was to become a foundation document that helped shape our present thinking about the mass bombing of civilian populations in war. Britain’s decision in 1942 massively to bomb German cities, largely in order to erode civilian morale, followed heated debate waged among the armed forces, scientists and politicians. The famed skirmish between Churchill’s scientific adviser Lord Cherwell (‘the Prof’) and the brilliant Sir Henry Tizard, key scientist at the Air Ministry, has become the stuff of legend. After the war controversy continued to rage over the operational success and ethics of ‘area bombing’, the largely indiscriminate blanket bombing of cities, the end product of the Royal Air Force’s almost hypnotic attraction to the concept of strategic bombing. Blackett was a traditionalist appalled at the concept of total war. He disbelieved in both the ethics and operational effectiveness of area bombing. He had been a major player in the events of 1942. Now, in the 1960s, he and another radical scientist, C.P.Snow, wartime boffin and novelist, helped form the historiography of the Tizard-Cherwell feud. Blackett and Snow, and sympathisers like J.D.Bernal, had been on the losing Tizard side in 1942. By dramatising this dispute within the very precincts of policymaking (Snow’s ‘corridors of power’), Blackett and Snow snatched victory from the jaws of their wartime defeat. Tizard, their hero, was rehabilitated, while the conservative ‘outsider’ Cherwell was found guilty of poor judgement or worse. This chapter will deal with this process of myth making and add a brief reality check from what we now know of events.1