A Summer Bright and Terrible Read Online Free PDF Page A

Thirty-eight people died and a hundred others were injured.
Had the bomber carried the one-ton bomb that night, all of them would have been
killed.
    The future looked promising.
     
     
    Three
     
    The First World War ended when the German
U-boats were defeated, America came into the war, and the British tanks overran
the trenches and crushed the German machine-gun nests. The airplane had not
been a decisive weapon; the air raids on Britain had killed fewer than two
thousand people during the entire course of the war, in a country that killed seven
thousand in traffic accidents every single year. But those air raids had shown
the future, and it was terrifying.
    In 1921 an Italian general, Giulio Douhet,
wrote in Command of the Air that future wars would not be fought by
armies on the ground, but by fleets of bombers sailing over their enemy’s defences.
They would be able to drop unimaginable terror on the home population,
destroying the people’s will to resist. Within two days, he wrote, thousands of
civilians would flee the cities. Nothing could stop the bombers, and no
population could withstand them.
    His argument was heard loud and clear in both
England and America. England’s Major General J. F. “Boney” Fuller wrote in 1923
that a fleet of five hundred bombers could cause two hundred thousand casualties
“and throw the whole city into panic within half an hour.” There would be “complete
industrial paralysis,” a rebellion against any government that could not provide protection—and none
could—and the war would be lost within a couple of days. Lord Balfour, heading
the Committee on Imperial Defence, estimated that an enemy could drop a daily
seventy-five tons day after day, and that London could not endure this. The Air
Ministry revealed the results of a statistical analysis showing that England’s
traditional enemy, France, could produce seven thousand deaths and an
additional twelve thousand severe casualties within the first week.
    In America, General Billy Mitchell wrote that
the only possible defence was offense: “The hostile nation’s power to make wars
must be destroyed. . . . [This included] factories, food producers, farms, and
homes, the places where people live and carry on their daily lives.”
    In other words, terror bombing.
    The message was too horrible for Americans to
hear, and so they tuned him out and retreated behind their oceans. If those
dreadful Europeans wanted to bomb each other, let them and be damned!
    Those dreadful Europeans, it seemed, had little
choice. Aside from building bigger fleets of bombers as a deterrent, what could
they do? Well, there was always the League of Nations and mutual disarmament,
of course.
    But there were problems with the League, aside
from the fact that the United States had turned its back on it. In 1923, the
League proposed a disarmament conference, which was finally convened in 1932,
to little avail. Germany opened the proceedings with the indisputable point
that the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the Great War, was manifestly
unfair; they wanted to be treated equally with the other great nations of the
world. The British were willing to do so, but the French would not accept
Germany as an equal partner unless Britain would guarantee to join France if
Germany again initiated a war, and this Britain would not do. It had had enough
of foreign commitments. The Japanese brought up the issue of racial equality,
which the Europeans thought was in quite poor taste and with this regard the currents of the conference were
turned awry, and lost the name of action.
    Its defeat was inevitable. Of all the nations, Britain
was the most vulnerable to aerial attack and therefore should have argued most
strenuously for disarmament—which would mean primarily the abolition of the
airplane as a weapon of war. But how could they, when they were making such
effective use of it?
    They had agreed with all the other nations in
the League on the proposal to