for an armistice. Douhet, though, was theorizing prior to the appearance of radar. He
assumed that air defence was futile, that ‘the bomber will always get through’, to quote
Stanley Baldwin, Britain’s Conservative leader, on 10 November 1932 (Bialer, 19 8 0: 14).
Radar changed the military–technical context fundamentally. With its invention and
improvement in the 1930s, the theory and practice of strategic bombing were critically
challenged. Furthermore, the 1930s saw the appearance of new generations of special-
ized fighter aircraft whose combat performance was significantly superior to that of
bombers. The Americans believed that the heavy bomber could be self-protecting,
provided it was abundantly armed with machine-guns and was flown in tight formation.
The air war over Germany in 1943 was to prove that they were wrong. It was the experi-
ence of World War II that prohibitive losses would be suffered in a strategic air campaign
unless air superiority were achieved first. The enemy’s air defences had to be defeated
before the strategic bomber force could demonstrate its potential.
The statecraft of the 1930s was conducted in the context of air rearmament by each
of the great powers, as well as deep uncertainty over the true peril from the air. It is a
well-attested fact, however, that fear of strategic bombing played a significant, possibly
even a determining, role in British, and hence French, policy over Czechoslovakia in
September 193 8. Because Britain gave credence to the theory of strategic air power, of
victory by the bombing of civilians in cities, it assumed that Germany shared that same
belief. However, Germany did not, and, as the events of 1940 were to reveal, it lacked
aircraft capable of posing a credible threat of strategic bombing.
In the 1930s, despite dubious evidence from Abyssinia and Spain, modern air power,
both offensive and defensive, essentially was an untried, but greatly feared, instrument.
‘The shadow of the bomber’ hung over international relations. Radar seemed to have
tilted the playing field in favour of the defence, but only future strategic history would
tell whether that really was the case.
Sea power
It is paradoxical that unjustified fear of the bomber had a powerful strategic effect
upon the course of events in the mid- and late 1930s, while the strategically more
deadly submarine was not a political factor at all. Admiral Dönitz’s U-boat campaign
was to be hampered critically by a shortage of long-range boats, as well as by the periodic
transparency of its radio-transmitted coded operational messages. Nevertheless, the U-
boat made a more substantial strategic contribution to the German war effort in the West
than did Göring’s Luftwaffe. Submarines were held in such low strategic regard in Britain
in the 1930s that in its 1935 Naval Agreement with Germany the latter was permitted to
construct a U-boat force up to the level of parity with the Royal Navy’s. This agreement,
negotiated by Britain without consulting Paris, licensed German naval construction
forbidden by Versailles – no submarines for Germany – and rested upon a quite unjus-
tified British complacency over the menace of submarines in future war. The Royal Navy
believed that it had the magical elixir that deprived submarines of most of their menace.
Sonar (sound navigation and ranging; or, as the British called it, ASDIC – the Anti-
Submarine Detection Investigating Committee) had been invented in both Britain and
France in 191 8 , but too late to be employed in the war. Tests and sea trials in the 1920s
and 1930s appeared to demonstrate that it had defanged the submarine. So, until war
The mechanization of war 119