By mid-October 1940 (84 years ago now), the so-called Battle of Britain had long morphed into what we have come to call the Blitz, a prolonged period lasting until May 1941 during which German bombers made regular and damaging raids on British ports and cities. But this popular narrative - popular with Brits because the BoB saw off a German invasion of Britain and the Blitz showed that we could 'take it' - has tended to obscure a more significant story, namely the emphasis placed on bombing by the British war machine of WW2. Thus the first German bombing raids on London are usually seen as a retaliation for British raids on Berlin in late August 1940, but in fact British bombers had been in action over German cities since mid-May that year - and, indeed, at the height of the Battle of Britain in August 1940 RAF Bomber Command would fly roughly double the number of missions over Germany as did the Luftwaffe over Britain. This would not have surprised British planners at the time, for the centre-piece of British offensive war strategy, devised and consolidated throughout rearmament in the 1930s by a sophisticated scientific-industrial base, was to develop a bombing force powerful enough to take the war to the enemy. The British army was too small to do this and the Royal Navy's job was to defend Britain and its imperial sea lanes. Until D-Day then, bombing was, in effect, the only possible Allied Second Front in Europe, and Churchill argued as such to Stalin. The problem was that for a good part of the war Allied bombing, both British and American, was both simply too inaccurate to do the job properly (a late 1941 report found that only 15% of RAF bombers dropped their payloads within 5 miles of the target) and incurred very high rates of loss in terms of planes and air crew. By 1944 technological innovations had largely surmounted these setbacks and Allied bombing really did then start to play a significant role in degrading the German war effort. In the process, tens of thousands of German civilians were killed and many German cities reduced to rubble - on a scale far greater than the Blitz - but such wholesale destruction was implicit in the whole bombing programme from its outset (and, indeed, was exported by the USAAF's Curtis Le May to Japan in 1945 as the hugely destructive firebombing of Tokyo and other cities was capped by the dropping of the two atomic bombs). So Spitfires and Hurricanes were the glamorous face of Britain's air war - and were rightly praised for their achievements in 1940 - but heavy bombers were always intended to be the real WMD of the British offensive in WW2. Listen to Episode 1 of the new series of Unknown Warriors about the Second World War.
If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again.
An Understanding History Podcast
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