Читать книгу Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain - Len Deighton - Страница 17

Like many high-ranking airmen, and manufacturers of bombing aircraft, Göring subscribed to the theories of General Giulio Douhet, an Italian who believed that armies and navies were best employed as defensive forces while bomber fleets conquered the enemy. Just before he died in 1930, General Douhet wrote a futuristic story called ‘The War of 19 –’. Often quoted but seldom read, Douhet’s words had such profound effects upon the German and the RAF High Commands that they are worth examining. Written in the documentary manner of H. G. Wells, Douhet’s story described how an ‘Independent German Air Force’ fought great aerial battles against the Belgian and French air units. ‘There was no doubt that the enemy’s purpose was to make the mobilisation and concentration of the Allied armies as difficult as possible,’ said Douhet’s imaginative fiction. The Allies replied with ‘night-bombing brigades’ that attacked German cities with explosives, incendiaries and poison gas.

Douhet’s fiction continues with the Independent German Air Force dropping leaflets telling the citizens of Namur, Soissons, Châlons and Troyes that their cities are to be obliterated, and that Paris and Brussels will go the same way unless they sue for peace. The tale ends when those towns are obliterated, and the governments do sue for peace. It was the pressure that civilians under air bombardment would put upon their own government that formed the basis of Douhet’s theories. At the end of his story he writes:

Impressed by the terrible effects of the bombings and the sight of the enemy planes flying freely and unopposed in their own sky, though they cursed the barbarous methods of the enemy, they could not help feeling bitter against their own aeronautical authorities who had not taken enough protective measures against such an eventuality.

Douhet believed that any nation devoting a large part of its air force to air defence, was risking conquest by a nation that spent everything on bombing fleets. Totally disregarding all the advantages that the defence enjoys in any form of warfare, Douhet smoothly concluded that ‘No one can command his own sky if he does not command his adversary’s sky.’

The German Army Air Service’s tactics in the First World War had already proved that this was nonsense, but Douhet provided abundant quotes for ambitious bomber theorists. Such men, in Germany, France, Britain and the USA, had long since decided that in war the importance of an air force (and its commanders) would be judged by the amount of damage done to the enemy, not by skill in defence. Douhet was important because he reinforced illusions about the effectiveness of the bomber and reduced still further the influence of the fighter pilots.

Although he had been a fighter pilot, Hermann Göring found Douhet’s ideas easy to accept. He was not sympathetic to the complex technical devices which had converted air warfare from armed barnstorming to crude science. Like many of his contemporaries, he found it convenient to stick to von Richthofen’s simplistic dictum that shooting down enemy planes was ‘the only important thing’ and that ‘everything else is nonsense’. And Göring’s Luftwaffe was dedicated to the offensive, designed for close co-operation with the invading German armies. It lacked long-range bombers, but – argued its leaders – what did that matter if the invasions were so successful that you could leap-frog forward with your medium-range machines from each new lot of captured airfields. It seemed to make sense.

By 1940, some were already claiming that Göring had proved Douhet right. The capitulation of Poland and the Netherlands had followed quickly after the bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam respectively. Even sceptics were beginning to believe that this was cause and effect. Certainly it seemed to provide Göring with a trump card. If his overall programme of air attacks against military targets in southern England failed, he had only to switch his whole attack to London itself and the British government would seek terms. Douhet said so, and history proved it.

Unfortunately for Göring there were, in Britain, some young flyers who had never read Douhet, and an elderly disbeliever named Dowding.

* The world’s first passenger-carrying airline service was operated by Zeppelin airships before the First World War.

* The Messerschmitt 109 and 110 designs were started when the company was named Bayerische Flugzeugwerke and thus were abbreviated Bf 109 and Bf 110. In July 1938 the company became Messerschmitt AG, so that the abbreviations for the later designs were Me 210, Me 410, Me 163, etc.