There are several possible ways to interpret the popular and political response to the bombing threat, either as prudent forethought or the product of an over-anxious imagination or a fatalistic acceptance of the unavoidable terms of modern conflict. Apprehension was not all fantasy, since modest bomb attack had already been experienced in the Great War, but that experience came to be distorted through eager extrapolation. All the popular and political responses to the air threat in the Europe of the 1930s shared a collective understanding that bombing would be a characteristic of future war, that it would involve assault on civilians and civilian life, that it would be aimed principally at cities and that it would involve destruction at a level likely to induce social chaos. Unlike most military revolutions, where change is generated within the military environment, the bombing war took shape first in the public imagination, where it was incubated under the glare of public anxiety long before most air forces had either the means or any doctrinal interest in creating a strategic capability aimed at the heart of an enemy nation. Air forces were bound to be affected by the way in which future war was framed in public discussion, because air power was at the centre of all the predictions about how catastrophic the next war would be. The attention given to air power flattered the infant air forces and inflated the desire for organizational autonomy and a strategic profile distinct from the other two services. There remained nevertheless a wide gap between the air war as it was popularly imagined and the evolving strategic outlook of the air forces themselves.
There were many factors inhibiting the development of a bombing strategy. For most of the interwar period air forces had to struggle to secure enough money to be able to construct the necessary infrastructure for the exercise of air power and to be able to keep abreast of a rapidly changing technology. At the same time the persistent calls for air disarmament, even for the abolition of all military aircraft, compelled air force leaders to spend time and effort simply trying to retain any military capability at all. Political effort also had to be devoted to contesting the aim of armies and navies to rein back air force ambitions for independence and to compel air forces to think principally in terms of support for surface forces. ‘The decision in war devolves to the forces on the ground,’ wrote one German commentator on the air force experience in the Spanish Civil War, ‘and on the forces that fight on the ground, not in the air or from the air.’75 In the United States there remained persistent hostility from the army to the claims for air force independence and a strategic bombing force. Commenting on the Italian war effort in Ethiopia in late 1935, Deputy Chief of Staff General Stanley Embick concluded that air power was secondary: ‘Italian progress from day to day is measured solely by the slow advance of the men in the mud… the role of military aviation must by its inherent nature be essentially of an auxiliary character.’ In his view, the claims made for air power were exaggerated and unrealistic: ‘They [aircraft] are fragile, vulnerable to the smallest missile, inoperable in bad weather, and exceedingly costly.’76 In France the air force remained closely tied to the army, even after a measure of organizational independence was conceded in 1933. Some 86 per cent of all French aircraft remained attached to individual army units, at the disposal of army commanders.77
